Note: Excerpts are from the authors' words except for subheads and occasional "Editor's notes" such as this.

April 30

Attorney General William Barr, left, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at a Justice Department news conference on April 18 where Barr spun Special Counsel Robert Mueller's then-forthcoming report to make it look like it exonerated President Trump and his main line of defenses (Screenshot).

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has tendered his resignation effective May 11. For someone like Donald Trump, who rants and raves like a lunatic about the nefarious “Deep State” he says is out to get him, Rosenstein has been and will remain a committed enforcer of the deep state.

Perhaps, not the deep state in the traditional sense. Rosenstein’s and Attorney General William Barr’s deep state is one of corporate manipulators that, today, finds itself entrenched firmly in the power centers of the United States, Russia, Britain, Canada, Brazil, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Israel, France, and most of the world’s other major governments sans China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua.

Rosenstein drafted and signed the letter that fired James Comey as FBI director. Rosenstein joined Barr in pressuring Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller to prematurely wrap up his investigation of foreign meddling in the 2016 election. Rosenstein never raised one peep when Trump appointed sacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions chief of staff Matt Whitaker as acting Attorney General, a position for which Whitaker was totally unsuited.

Throughout his career, Rosenstein has been an untrustworthy, slimy worm.

Rosenstein’s time in the Public Integrity Section was during Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh’s investigation of the Reagan and Bush administrations for the Iran-Contra scandal. There was plenty of public corruption in those days, but Rosenstein would witness Attorney General Barr prepare pardons for six pardons by George H W Bush for top officials convicted as a result of Walsh’s investigation.

Mueller’s exasperation over Barr’s non-cooperation with Walsh’s investigation appeared in William Safire’s column in The New York Times. Safire called Barr “Captain Cover-up.”

From 1995 to 1997, Rosenstein worked in the Office of Independent Counsel Ken Starr (shown below) as a co-counsel in what amounted to an actual witch hunt by Republicans of President Bill Clinton.

In 1996, Rosenstein, Starr and other prosecutors gathered at a North Little Rock, Arkansas restaurant to celebrate three convictions of individuals – James and Susan McDougal and Arkansas Democratic Governor Jim Guy Tucker, all friends of Bill Clinton -- who were found guilty in the so-called “Whitewater” investigation led by Starr. Rosenstein joined the other prosecutors in lighting up their “victory cigars.”

.... When Trump appointed Barr to be his “Roy Cohn” at Justice, it was old home week for Rosenstein. Once again, the man who sat in the office of the Attorney General was the same person Rosenstein had assisted thirty years earlier in the cover-up of the Iran-Contra scandal.

Rosenstein would use his remaining time at Justice to appear behind Barr at a news conference at which Barr incorrectly described Mueller’s final report on election manipulation as a total exoneration.

Rosenstein also praised Barr in public remarks delivered to the Yale Club in New York. In full weasel mode, Rosenstein also lauded Trump for his “respect for the rule of law” and berated the Obama administration and the press.

Alliance for Justice, Opinion: The House Needs a Dose of Urgency, Bill Yeomans (right), April 30, 2019. Attorney General Barr unveiled a heavily smudged version of Robert Mueller’s report twelve days ago. He misrepresented its content both in writing and at a press conference before its release. His false narrative – that the president had engaged in neither collusion nor obstruction – continues to resonate with much of the public.

While journalists and experts who have read the 448-page report have rejected Barr’s take and marveled at his audacity, the burden rests with Congress to set the record straight. Congress responded initially with a face-plant, otherwise known as recess. It returns this week to try again.

Trump is pushing the House toward impeachment. His posture strengthens the case for bundling investigation of all of his obstructive and contemptuous conduct into hearings in a single forum that is focused on moving toward impeachment. While crystal balls are in short supply, the political argument against impeachment is not clear. Polling suggests that 37% of the general public and 60% of Democrats support the initiation of impeachment. Those numbers seem remarkably high considering that Barr’s spin as amplified by Trump has dominated the news. The polling was conducted before Trump’s full rejection of oversight.

People have not read – and will not read – the full report. Nor are they likely to pay close attention to diffuse oversight hearings in a variety of different committees. But they will pay attention to high-drama, focused hearings in a single committee that lay out the evidence in the report. Democrats need to trust that the public will react with disgust and horror to Trump’s astonishing abuse of the public trust. Recall that Republicans presented united opposition to Nixon’s impeachment and it wasn’t until two weeks before his resignation that a majority of the country first supported his removal from office.

True, the Senate is unlikely to vote for removal, but months of hearings in the House followed by a trial in the Senate will make every American aware of Trump’s betrayal and will force every Senator to defend their vote to keep Trump in office. That’s a pretty powerful lead into the 2020 election.

This process will not be easy. While Congress may have the legal right to demand that witnesses testify and the executive branch produce documents, the forces of time and inertia favor the president. The House must rely on contempt citations followed by civil enforcement litigation. The process will take time, but moving to impeachment will strengthen the House’s legal position in overcoming executive privilege and objections to the scope of its investigation. It will also help in obtaining grand jury material collected by Mueller.

Washington Post, Mueller complained to Barr that his letter did not capture ‘context’ of probe, Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky​, May 1, 2019 (print ed.). Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III (shown in a Washington Post screenshot) expressed his concerns in a letter to William P. Barr, right, after the attorney general publicized Mueller's principal conclusions. The letter was followed by a phone call during which Mueller pressed Barr to release executive summaries of his report.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Robert Mueller drops the hammer on William Barr, Bill Palmer, April 30, 2019. If you felt that Attorney General William Barr’s four page “summary” of the Mueller report was a sham, it turns out you’re in good company. Special Counsel Robert Mueller himself felt the same way, and it turns out Mueller sent Barr a formal letter accusing him of misrepresenting the “context, nature & substance” of the report. This bombshell, coming from the New York Times and echoed by NBC News, suddenly changes everything at a crucial time.

The Times merely lists its source for this bombshell as being someone in the Justice Department, but it’s not difficult to parse that this leak is happening either at Mueller’s behest, or with Mueller’s blessing. Moreover, this reveals that there’s a letter floating around in the DOJ which serves as a smoking gun when it comes to Barr’s attempt at covering up Mueller’s true findings. And it can’t be a coincidence that this is being leaked just half a day before Barr is scheduled to appear for the first of his two rounds of congressional testimony this week.

We can’t stress enough that this changes everything. Even though tomorrow’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing will be run by Trump sycophant Lindsey Graham, the numerous Senate Democrats on the committee will each get their five minutes to grill Barr in front of the cameras. Now they’re armed with the knowledge that Mueller considered Barr’s summary to be dishonest, they can hit Barr hard with it – and they can demand that Barr turn over Mueller’s letter.

We’ll see if William Barr even shows up for tomorrow’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. This creates even more doubt about whether Barr will show up for Thursday’s Democratic Party-controlled House Judiciary Committee hearing, which he was already publicly wavering on. At this point, if Barr doesn’t show up Thursday, there’s no remaining doubt that Chairman Jerry Nadler will hold him in contempt in the most aggressive manner possible. Also, look for Nadler to swiftly subpoena Mueller’s letter to Barr, if Nadler doesn’t have it already. Read the New York Times bombshell here.

Prince’s statements “impaired the Committee’s understanding of Russia’s attempts to contact and influence the incoming Trump Administration,” Schiff wrote in his referral letter to Attorney General William P. Barr, describing six alleged instances in which Prince misled the panel about his January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles with a Russian banker tied to the Kremlin — and how much the Trump transition team knew about it.

“The evidence is so weighty that the Justice Department needs to consider this,” Schiff said during a Washington Post Live event earlier Tuesday, announcing his intention to make the referral later in the day.

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte warned the campus on Tuesday evening of shots being fired and urged people to “Run, Hide, Fight.” Campus buildings were locked down.

U.S. Immigration Policy

New York Times, Trump Changes Rules for Asylum Seekers, Adding Fees and Limiting Work, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Caitlin Dickerson, April 30, 2019 (print ed.). President Trump on Monday ordered new restrictions on asylum seekers at the Mexican border — including application fees and work permit restraints — and directed that cases in the already clogged immigration courts be settled within 180 days.

In a memo sent to Kevin McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, and Attorney General William P. Barr, the president took another step to reshape asylum law, which is determined by Congress, from the White House.

The restrictions do not take effect immediately. Mr. Trump gave administration officials 90 days to draw up regulations that would carry out his orders. They would be among the first significant changes to asylum policy since Mr. McAleenan replaced Kirstjen Nielsen as head of homeland security and the president signaled he would take a tougher stance on the asylum seekers swamping the border.

But he didn’t go home. Instead — on orders from his bosses, Juarez said — he would stay on, sometimes past midnight. He vacuumed carpets, polished silverware and helped get the restaurant at Trump National Golf Club Westchester in Briar­cliff Manor, N.Y., ready for breakfast the next day.

All off the clock. Without being paid.

“It was that way with all the managers: Many of them told us, ‘Just clock out and then stay and do the side work,’ ” said Juarez, who spent a decade at the golf club, before leaving in May 2018. “There was a lot of side work.”

Allegations that workers were routinely shortchanged on their pay at President Trump’s suburban country club are now the subject of an inquiry by the New York attorney general, whose investigators have interviewed more than two dozen former employees.

The inquiry could raise awkward political questions for Trump, who has made stopping illegal immigration a centerpiece of his presidency and his reelection campaign but faces allegations that his business benefited from low-paid undocumented workers.

In the suit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, the president and his family members argue that the Democratic House committee leaders who issued the subpoenas engaged in a broad overreach.

“This case involves congressional subpoenas that have no legitimate or lawful purpose,” the suit alleges. “The subpoenas were issued to harass President Donald J. Trump, to rummage through every aspect of his personal finances, his businesses and the private information of the president and his family, and to ferret about for any material that might be used to cause him political damage. No grounds exist to establish any purpose other than a political one.”

The House’s Intelligence and Financial Services Committees issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank, a longtime lender to Mr. Trump’s real estate company, and other financial institutions two weeks ago, seeking a long list of documents and other materials related to Deutsche Bank’s history of lending and providing accounts to Mr. Trump and his family. People with knowledge of the investigation said it related to possible money laundering by people in Russia and Eastern Europe.

A jury found the officer, Mohamed Noor, guilty of third-degree murder and manslaughter in the death of Justine Damond, a 40-year-old Australian woman who had approached Noor’s squad car shortly after calling 911 to report a possible rape near her home.

Noor, who the department fired after he was charged in 2018, avoided a conviction on the more serious count of intentional second degree murder. The Associated Press reported that jurors deliberated for 11 hours total on Monday and Tuesday before they reached a decision.

New York Times, Juan Guaidó Calls for Military Uprising in Venezuela, Nicholas Casey, April 30, 2019. Mr. Guaidó, the opposition leader, called for protests backed by the armed forces, issuing a challenge to the government that the military has protected. He appeared with soldiers outside a military base in Caracas with Leopoldo López, a former political prisoner.

Appearing alongside soldiers at a military base, the Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó (right) called on Tuesday for mass antigovernment protests backed by the armed forces, issuing a direct challenge to the government that the military has so far protected.

He has called before for the military to rise up against the government of President Nicolás Maduro, but doing so flanked by men in uniform, at a base in the heart of the capital, was a new step.

Jorge Rodríguez, the government’s information minister, said on Twitter that government was “confronting and deactivating a small group of military traitors” that he said had taken over the base “to promote a coup.” He blamed the “coup-mongering ultraright,” which he said had pushed for a violent agenda for months in Venezuela.

Washington Post, Dozens wounded in Venezuela as protests against Maduro turn violent, Mariana Zuñiga, Anthony Faiola and Terrence McCoy​, April 30, 2019. Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Caracas at the behest of opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who claimed he had the support of military officials. President Trump accused Cuba of conducting military operations in Venezuela and threatened an embargo on Cuba if it did not stop.

New York Times, Japan Would Make Him Emperor, but She Called Him ‘Jimmy,’ Motoko Rich, April 30, 2019 (print ed.). There has been an emperor in Japan for more than 15 centuries, making the Chrysanthemum Throne the world’s oldest continuous monarchy. On Tuesday, the emperor stepped down, yielding to his eldest son in the first abdication in 200 years.

We know him as Akihito, the emperor of Japan, a gentle figure who championed peace in a nation devastated by war. It was 1946, and Prince Akihito had a new American teacher. He would never wield the power of Japanese emperors of old, but he might help heal his country. He has now yielded the throne to his son in the first abdication in 200 years. This is the family’s story.

New York Times, Mysterious ISIS Leader Is Not Dead, New Video Shows, Ben Hubbard, April 30, 2019 (print ed.). Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appeared on video for the first time in five years, reasserting authority in the wake of lost territory and an attack in Sri Lanka.

Five years ago, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi mounted the pulpit of a mosque in Iraq to declare himself the head of a rapidly expanding terrorist organization.

Since then, his group, the Islamic State, has transfixed the world with its apocalyptic violence while he has remained a mystery. Spottings were rare. Rumors swirled that he was wounded or dead. The United States put $25 million on his head and still failed to find him.

On Monday, he reappeared, leaning on a cushion with an assault rifle at his side, in a video seeking to rally his followers after the loss of the group’s territory in Iraq and Syria and its execution of one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in years, on Easter in Sri Lanka.

It was unclear when or where the video was recorded, but the parts that refer to recent events, like the Sri Lanka attack, are addressed in audio, not video, suggesting that it may have been recorded weeks ago with newer audio portions added later.

U.S. Politics

New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s Anti-Abortion Incitement, Michelle Goldberg, April 29, 2019. The president’s lies about infanticide could inspire violence. Abortion providers are regular targets of domestic terrorism, and Trump’s lies serve as incitement. In 2016, a man fired an AR-15 inside a Washington pizzeria because he believed right-wing conspiracy theories that it was the epicenter of a child sex trafficking ring involving Hillary Clinton. Now the putative leader of the free world is spreading tales about unimaginable Democratic depravity toward innocent children.

It’s not a stretch to imagine an unstable Trump acolyte taking him both seriously and literally. Indeed, it seems that at least one already has. Last week, a 30-year-old Trump supporter named Matthew Haviland was arrested and accused of threatening to rape and murder a professor who supports abortion rights. According to an affidavit by an F.B.I. joint terrorism task force officer, Haviland wrote in an email, “I will kill every Democrat in the world so we never more have to have our babies brutally murdered by you absolute terrorists.” He also made over a hundred threatening calls to an abortion clinic.

New York Times, Opinion: The Zombie Style in American Politics, Paul Krugman (right), April 29, 2019. Why bad ideas just won’t stay dead. If you’ve been trying to follow the Republican response to revelations about what happened in 2016, you may be a bit confused. We’re not even talking about an ever-shifting party line; new excuses keep emerging, but old excuses are never abandoned. On one side, we have Rudy Giuliani saying that “there’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians.” On the other side, we have Jared Kushner denying that Russia did anything beyond taking out “a couple of Facebook ads.”

It’s all very strange. Or, more accurately, it can seem very strange if you still think of the G.O.P. as a normal political party, one that adopts policy positions and then defends those positions in more or less good faith.

But if you have been following Republican arguments over the years, you know that the party’s response to evidence of Russian intervention in 2016 is standard operating procedure. On issue after issue, what you see are multiple levels of denial combined with a refusal ever to give up an argument no matter how completely it has been discredited.

What the right’s positioning on inequality, climate and now Russian election interference have in common is that in each case the people pretending to be making a serious argument are actually apparatchiks operating in bad faith. What I mean by that is that in each case those making denialist arguments, while they may invoke evidence, don’t actually care what the evidence says; at a fundamental level, they aren’t interested in the truth. Their goal, instead, is to serve a predetermined agenda.

The public deserves to know that the big debates in modern U.S. politics aren’t a conventional clash of rival ideas. They’re a war in which one side’s forces consist mainly of intellectual zombies.

New York Times, Stacey Abrams will not run for Senate in 2020, Alexander Burns, April 30, 2019. Democrats courted her to challenge David Perdue, a close Trump ally, April 30, 2019 (print ed.). Stacey Abrams announced on Tuesday that she would not run for Senate in 2020, denying Democrats their favored recruit for the race in Georgia. She did not say if she planned to run for president, which she has also been considering doing.

By opting not to seek the Senate seat next year, Ms. Abrams may be setting her sights instead on the presidency or the vice presidency, or another campaign for the governorship in 2022, when the man who defeated her, Gov. Brian Kemp, right, will be up for re-election.

More U.S. Crime, Courts

New York Times, Who Killed Atlanta’s Children? Forty years ago, a serial killer terrorized the city, Audra D. S. Burch, April 30, 2019. Families have been searching for answers ever since. Forty years ago, Atlanta was terrorized by a serial killer who snatched and killed two dozen children, aged 7 to 17. They vanished with spine-chilling regularity, only to have their bodies discovered weeks or months later. In rivers. Under a bridge. Behind dumpsters.

The menacing drumbeat of child abductions, mostly of young African-American boys, shook a city that was emerging at the time as a progressive black mecca. Gripped by fear, anxiety and helplessness, parents refused to let their children play outside. Some took their children out of school. Psychics arrived to help. The city imposed a curfew.

New York Times, No One Feels Safe Here’: Life in Alabama’s Prisons, Staff report, April 30, 2019 (print ed.). Earlier this month, the Justice Department issued a graphic report on Alabama’s prisons. The Times asked three men sentenced to life without parole to tell us what it was like inside.

On April 2, the Department of Justice issued a horrifying report on Alabama’s prisons, with graphic accounts of prisoners who were tortured, burned, raped, sodomized, stabbed and murdered in largely unsupervised dorms. (In hundreds of reports of sexual abuse, for example, the investigators did not find a single instance of a guard intervening. Officers are so outnumbered, the report said, that they stay in a secure area rather than patrol.)

The report underscored the conditions depicted in more than 2,000 photographs, sent to The New York Times, of violent incidents and contraband inside St. Clair prison northeast of Birmingham.

Not only are the prisons bad, the Department of Justice report said, but Alabama has known for years that they are bad, and has made only marginal attempts to improve them. It is not that the prisoners are particularly violent, but that the prisons are understaffed and overcrowded, with some holding two or three times the number of people they were designed for. They are also, the report said, lousy with corruption and rife with drugs, cellphones and large, sharp knives, which many prisoners consider necessary for self-protection. In 2017, inspectors found that not a single building had a working fire alarm.

The alleged reference to a “rape attic” is just one of the troubling details recently revealed about the culture within the selective Pennsylvania college’s fraternities that was made public in internal documents leaked to two campus publications. Redacted versions of the documents, published earlier this month by the Phoenix and Voices, have since sparked fierce protests from students, including an ongoing sit-in that started Saturday on the campus located west of Philadelphia.

Over the weekend, the growing outcry prompted administrators to suspend all fraternity activity pending the results of an investigation.

The 116 pages of documents reportedly came from the “historical archives” of Swarthmore’s chapter of Phi Psi, which is not nationally affiliated, and contains meeting minutes and details of pledge tasks. The documents feature graphic descriptions of members’ sexual encounters, including a reference to a “rape tunnel.” It also describes their conversations about women, minority groups and sexual assault that often contained offensive language, such as homophobic and racial slurs. The documents chronicle activities between 2010 and 2016, the Phoenix reported.

His death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was confirmed in a family statement after he was taken off life support. Mr. Singleton had been admitted to the hospital on April 17, reportedly after having a stroke. His family said he had a history of hypertension.

His mother, Shelia Ward, said last week that he was in a coma and filed court papers asking to be appointed his temporary conservator. Several of his children at the time opposed her trying to take control of his medical and financial decision making and publicly disputed her assessment of his medical state.

"Boyz N the Hood,” a bleakly realistic film about three teenagers growing up amid gang violence in South Central Los Angeles, established Mr. Singleton’s credentials and placed him in the conversation with more established African-American directors like Spike Lee, Bill Duke, Julie Dash, Robert Townsend and Reginald Hudlin.

“When I was 18, I saw ‘She’s Gotta Have It,’ ” Mr. Singleton said, referring to Mr. Lee’s 1986 breakthrough film, in a YouTube video in 2013. “The movie was so powerful to me, as a young black teen who grew up seeing movies with not a lot of people who looked like me.”

He was 22 when he began shooting “Boyz,” which follows Tre (played by Cuba Gooding Jr.) and his friends Ricky (Morris Chestnut) and Doughboy (Ice Cube) as they try to avoid gangs and drugs. When Ricky is shot and killed by a gang member, Doughboy, his half brother, seeks revenge, but Tre backs away from retribution.

Mr. Singleton had graduated from film school less than a year earlier. He later conceded that when he made “Boyz N the Hood” he did not yet know how to direct a film.

“As the movie was going along, I was learning how to direct,” he said after a 25th-anniversary screening of the film in Manhattan in 2016. “As it becomes more intense and comes on to the third act, the camerawork is more and more fluid, because I’m getting better and better — and taking more chances.”

New York Times, U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand Over Your Private Data, Iliana Magra, April 30, 2019 (print ed.). Privacy and victim advocates criticized the policy, which asks victims and witnesses to consent to searching their electronic devices, or their cases may be dropped.

World News: North Africa

Strategic Culture Institute, Analysis: Tectonic Shift in North Africa Puts Washington in Passenger’s Seat, Wayne Madsen (Investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist), April 30, 2019. A massive shift in the geo-political status quo in North Africa has placed the United States in the passenger’s, not the pilot’s, seat. No longer does Washington, not even as a co-pilot with the French, influence the actions of key actors in North African affairs.

The shift in the North African chessboard is the result of three recent major events.

They are the resignation of Algeria’s ailing 82-year old president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was about to begin his fifth term as president when massive protests led to his decision to step down. Bouteflika had served as president since 1999, the overthrow of Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, and the imminent fall of the Libyan government in Tripoli.

The Algerian military had originally seized power in 1992 after it was apparent that an Islamist party, the Islamic Salvation Front, would win a democratic election. Bouteflika assumed control of a “National Reconciliation” government in 1999, which was, in reality, a front for the military. Bouteflika had been on the Algerian political scene the 1970s, when he served as Algeria’s globetrotting foreign minister. Bouteflika’s resignation spelled the end of the rule of Algeria’s independence-era “old guard” – the “four Bs of Bouteflika, Ahmed Ben Bella, Houari Boumediene, and Chadli Bendjedid.

Bouteflika resigned on April 2, 2019. He was replaced by acting president Abdelkader Bensalah, the Chairman of the Council of State, who remains supported by the armed forces hierarchy, particularly, Algerian People’s National Army chief of staff Ahmed Gaid Salah, until a new presidential election is held this summer.

For the world, Bouteflika’s resignation represented a sea change for the resource-rich North African nation. When Bouteflika was Algeria’s foreign minister in the 1970s, his foreign interlocutors included US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, British Foreign Secretary James Callaghan, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, and Egyptian Foreign Minister Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

His concerns about a tilted economic playing field recently led Mr. Robertson to join the Akron chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. At a gathering this month, as members discussed Karl Marx and corporate greed over chocolate chip cookies, it wasn’t long before talk turned to income inequality and how the government helps the wealthy avoid taxes.

It’s a topic that several presidential candidates, led by Senators Bernie Sanders (left) and Elizabeth Warren, have hammered recently as they travel the campaign trail, spurred by a report that 60 Fortune 500 companies paid no federal taxes on $79 billion in corporate income last year. Amazon, which is reported to be opening a center in an abandoned Akron mall that will employ 500 people, has become the poster child for corporate tax avoidance; last year it had an effective tax rate of below zero — receiving a rebate — on income of $10.8 billion.

For decades, profitable companies have been able to avoid corporate taxes. But the list of those paying zero roughly doubled last year as a result of provisions in President Trump’s 2017 tax bill that expanded corporate tax breaks and reduced the tax rate on corporate income.

“Amazon, Netflix and dozens of major corporations, as a result of Trump’s tax bill, pay nothing in federal taxes,” Mr. Sanders said last week during a Fox News town hall-style event. “I think that’s a disgrace.”

Deep State & Trump

Dr. Peter Dale Scott is considered the father of “Deep Politics” — the study of hidden permanent institutions and interests whose influence on the political realm transcends the elected, appointed, and career officials who come and go. He is the author of several critically acclaimed books on the pivotal events of our country’s recent past, including "American War Machine" (2010) and "The American Deep State" (2018) relevant to the column below.

For two years President Donald Trump and Fox News have been attacking the “deep state” in Washington, usually referring to the intelligence agencies, like FBI and CIA, who have had Trump under investigation.

But my notion of the deep state also includes private sources of power, outside government — but able to influence it illicitly — such as the Russian private Bank Alfa.

Trump Watch

Washington Post, Trump’s lack of cooperation with Congress intensifies impeachment push in House, Rachael Bade and Mike DeBonis, April 29, 2019. Frustration among House Democratic investigators is intensifying after President Trump’s refusal to cooperate with congressional inquiries, leading some to privately question whether they should try to pressure Speaker Nancy Pelosi, right, into launching impeachment proceedings.

The chairmen and members of the six panels investigating the president are increasingly angered by the White House’s unwillingness to comply as they carry out their oversight role, according to several House Democratic officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter freely. But that anger extends into the ranks of Pelosi’s team as well, according to multiple leadership officials.

A recent threat by Attorney General William P. Barr not to show up for a scheduled hearing Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee has only exacerbated the situation after the White House last week vowed to block some officials from appearing for subpoenaed depositions or interviews.

New York Times, Barr’s Feud With House Escalates With Threat of Subpoena, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, April 29, 2019 (print. ed.). The House Judiciary Committee was planning to question Attorney General William P. Barr, right, on Thursday. But he objected to the panel’s proposed format. The witness is not going to tell the committee how to conduct its hearing, period,” the committee chairman, Representative Jerrold Nadler said. Related story below:

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Opinion: "Progressives” who genuflect at Trump’s altar, Wayne Madsen, April 29, 2019 (subscription required). When the history of the present dysfunctional presidential administration is written, one of the most peculiar aspects out of a whole host of odd phenomena will be the support rendered to Donald Trump from the most unlikely sector of all: a group of normally anti-war and self-professed progressives.

But on April 26, just 226 days later, the president crossed the 10,000 mark — an average of nearly 23 claims a day in this seven-month period, which included the many rallies he held before the midterm elections, the partial government shutdown over his promised border wall and the release of the special counsel’s report on Russian interference in the presidential election.

This milestone appeared unlikely when The Fact Checker first started this project during his first 100 days. In the first 100 days, Trump averaged less than five claims a day, which would have added up to about 7,000 claims in a four-year presidential term. But the tsunami of untruths just keeps looming larger and larger.

Washington Post, Rosenstein resigns effective May 11, Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky, April 29, 2019. ​Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of President Trump and Russia, will step down after a tumultuous two years on the job. Analysis: Rosenstein officially bows out — and bows to Trump

U.S. Politics

White nationalists march in 2017 torchlight parade in Charlotttesville, Virginia.

First came Joe Biden’s campaign announcement video highlighting President Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comment about the 2017 white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville that left a counterprotester dead.

Then Trump dug in, arguing that he was referring not to the self-professed neo-Nazi marchers, but to those who had opposed the removal of a statue of the “great” Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Less than 24 hours later came another act of violence described by authorities as a hate crime: Saturday’s shooting at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., in which a gunman killed one person and injured three others.

Those events have pushed the rising tide of white nationalism to the forefront of the 2020 presidential campaign, putting Trump on the defensive and prompting even some Republicans to acknowledge that the president is taking a political risk by continuing to stand by his Charlottesville comments.

Washington Post, Why Vermont’s single-payer effort failed and what Democrats can learn from it, Amy Goldstein, April 29, 2019. In 2011, Vermont launched the nation’s first single-payer health system. Three years later, lawmakers still struggled with how to fund it, Its failure in 2014 offers lessons for Democrats today who embrace Medicare-for-all or other aspirations for universal insurance coverage.

For those reasons and others — a decade of stagnant attendance, studios that only seem to make sequels of sequels (of sequels) — movie theaters are seen as a dying business. Why trudge to a theater when Netflix is available in your pocket anytime you want?

Yet almost every multiplex on the planet was gridlocked over the weekend. Avengers: Endgame”took in $1.2 billion worldwide, arriving as the No. 1 movie in at least 54 countries. The euphorically reviewed movie collected a record-breaking $350 million in the United States and Canada, zooming past “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (2015), which had opening-weekend sales of $248 million, or about $270 million in today’s dollars.

“It shows the power of theaters — the ability, even in a hyper-fragmented culture, to deliver that wildly big communal experience,” Megan Colligan, president of Imax Filmed Entertainment, said in an interview.

It also shows that Hollywood is increasingly reliant on spectacle to jolt people away from Facebook, Fortnite, Hulu and Netflix and into movie theaters.

For those reasons and others — a decade of stagnant attendance, studios that only seem to make sequels of sequels (of sequels) — movie theaters are seen as a dying business. Why trudge to a theater when Netflix is available in your pocket anytime you want?

National Press Club, Former Sen. Richard Lugar was a Reliable Source regular, Mark Schoeff Jr. and Andy Fisher, April 29, 2019. For many years during his career on Capitol Hill, former Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., had an apple and yogurt at his desk for lunch. When he joined the National Press Club in 2017, he became a lunchtime regular at the Reliable Source.

Lugar, the longest serving member of Congress from Indiana, died Sunday, April 28, at Inova Fairfax Heart and Vascular Institute in Virginia. The cause of death was complications from chronic inflammatory demylinating polyneuropathy. He was 87.

A former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Lugar was the co-author of legislation with former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., that rid former Soviet bloc countries of thousands of nuclear weapons. He also served as chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee during his Senate tenure from 1977-2013.

A former mayor of Indianapolis, Lugar founded the Lugar Center in 2013, a think tank devoted to issues he spent his career pursuing, such as nuclear disarmament, food and energy security and governance. The photo is from the center.

Club member Maureen Groppe wrote a comprehensive Lugar obituary for USA Today .

Crime, Prisons

KHOU-TV (Watertown, NY.), No jail time for school bus driver who admitted to raping 14-year-old girl, Andrew Krietz, April 29, 2019. The 26-year-old will also not be included in online sex offender databases because he is considered a low risk offender. A judge handed down 10 years' probation last week to a former New York school bus driver after he admitted to raping a 14-year-old girl.

Shane Piche, 26, will be registered as a Level 1 sex offender, according to the Waterford Daily Times. The judge reportedly said because he had no prior arrests and there was one victim, the sentence was appropriate. Level 1 is considered the lowest risk level out of three, and Piche will not be included in online sex offender databases.

He pleaded guilty in February to raping a 14-year-old girl who he met through his job as a bus driver with the city's school district, the newspaper reports.

Piche also was charged with unlawfully dealing with a child and endangering the welfare of a child after he allegedly gave the girl alcohol. The Times reports Piche is required to pay $375 in court fees and surcharges, plus a $1,000 special sex offender registration fee.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Chicago upheld an order requiring the paralegal, Elena Stephens, to pay about $35,000. In a per curiam opinion, a 7th Circuit panel said Stephens could be sanctioned for dismissing the lawsuit to avoid answering discovery questions on two matters. One matter concerned how Stephens acquired the law firm’s confidential email discussion list of firm employees that she used to email criticism of her supervisors. The other asked Stephens to account for her asserted damages.

Stephens had alleged that she was sexually harassed and mocked because of her Russian heritage and accent during the year she worked at the law firm. Stephens said she was fired in 2017 after she reported the discrimination.

The morning after the Supreme Court reviewed his administration’s most important case of the term, President Trump informed the justices he might have another task for them.

“I DID NOTHING WRONG,” Trump tweeted Wednesday. “If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Constitutional experts immediately derided Trump’s faulty legal analysis. But the more striking message, the day after the court considered the administration’s plan to put a citizenship question on the 2020 Census, seemed to be Trump’s consistent theme that he views the nation’s highest court as an ally, and safeguard against lower court defeats and congressional opponents.

His administration’s lawyers have tried to leapfrog the legal process to seek the high court’s quick review of adverse rulings and nationwide injunctions by lower courts, which they say handicap Trump’s initiatives in numbers that can’t be defended. They are ready, too, to go to court as the president resists demands from congressional Democrats investigating his conduct, business dealings and personal finances .

ZeroHedge, Kingdom Beheads 16-Year-Old For Sending Whatsapp Message, Staff report, April 28, 2019. The controversy over Saudi Crown Prince MbS’s alleged orchestration of the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, right, has largely subsided since the government insider-turned-critic walked into the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul in early October and never walked out.

But a new controversy is brewing over one of the kingdom’s most controversial practices: Its mass-beheadings of men convicted of ‘terrorism’ charges, typically members of the Shiite minority living in the eastern part of the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia has long practiced execution by beheading. But this year, the mass extermination of 37 of mostly Shiite men this week provoked condemnation from the UN and other human rights organizations, as several teenage boys were executed for crimes as seemingly petty a sending Whatsapp messages about government demonstrations.

One particularly disturbing case was recounted in the UK’s The Sun tabloid. Abdulkareem al-Hawaj, right, was just just 16 when he was arrested. Just a schoolboy at the time, he was detained and accused of being a “terrorist” for sending texts online about an anti-government demonstration.

Before making his ‘confession,’ Abdulkareem, a Shiite Muslim who was 21 at the time of his execution, was reportedly brutally tortured. With his hands chained above his head, he was beaten and electrocuted. Amnesty International denounced his trial as a farce, since he was denied access to proper defense counsel. Police also reportedly threatened to kill his family if he didn’t confess to his crimes.

They arrived a day or two after the Easter Sunday bombings and moved into a low-slung house behind a high wall and black metal gate, unloading boxes from a pale gray minivan.

But the neighbors in the seaside town of Sainthamaruthu soon began to suspect that something wasn’t right. Finally, a group of local residents asked the new arrivals — men, women and children — to leave town.

Within hours, the quiet lane was turned into a war zone.

On Friday, at least 15 people, including six children, were killed in bomb blasts and gunfire as Sri Lankan security forces closed in on the house.

Police believe the fiery explosions were triggered deliberately — the final violent acts of a group whose hideout had bombmaking items and black backpacks. Their preparations pointed to just one thing: possible plans for the next steps in a campaign of terror that began April 21 with bombings at churches that claimed more than 250 lives.

Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena, shown at left in a file photo, said Friday that strict new measures were being taken to identify and track people, similar to hard-line methods used during the civil war between separatist ethnic Tamils and the government that ended in 2009.

He said that about 70 individuals suspected of ties to the Islamic State had been arrested, and that an additional 70 suspects were at large. On Saturday, the National Thowheed Jamaath, the Islamist extremist group linked to the Easter attacks, was banned.

“We had to declare an emergency situation to suppress terrorists and ensure a peaceful environment in the country,” the president said. “Every household in the country will be checked” and lists of all residents made to “ensure that no unknown person can live anywhere.”

More Hate Crimes

Washington Post, Shooting at Calif. synagogue leaves 1 dead, 3 injured in what mayor calls a ‘hate crime,’ Deanna Paul and Katie Mettler, April 28, 2019 (print ed.). Police said a 19-year-old man turned himself in shortly after the shooting. A woman died, and a girl and two men remain in the hospital in stable condition. The shooting on the final day of Passover came six months after a gunman at a Pittsburgh synagogue killed 11 people in the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history.

On the final day of Passover, six months to the day after a shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue left 11 dead, a white man bearing an assault weapon and anti-Semitic views stormed the Chabad of Poway near San Diego and started shooting.

The gunman, identified by police as 19-year-old John Earnest, shot the rabbi, two Israelis from the same family and a 60-year-old woman named Lori Gilbert Kaye — a beloved, dedicated member of the congregation since its inception more than 30 years ago.

The rabbi and the Israeli nationals survived their injuries. Kaye did not.

National Rifle Association President Oliver North has been ousted after an alleged extortion scheme within the group’s highest-ranking officials came to light on Friday. In a statement, North told the organization he was “informed” he would not be nominated for reelection. North’s term ends Monday.

The NRA’s chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, wrote a letter to the board Thursday accusing North of plotting to remove him from the group by threatening to release to the board “damaging” information about LaPierre. He claimed North, a former Marine Corps lieutenant colonel perhaps best known for his role in the Iran-contra affair, was pressuring him to resign over alleged financial transgressions.

“Delivered by a member of our Board on behalf of his employer, the exhortation was simple: resign or there will be destructive allegations made against me and the NRA,” LaPierre wrote in the letter, which was published Friday by the Wall Street Journal.

On Saturday, at the NRA’s annual meeting in Indianapolis, Richard Childress, a vice president at the NRA, read what amounted to a resignation letter from North that announced and explained his departure.

“Please know I hoped to be with you today as NRA president endorsed for reelection,” North wrote. “I’m now informed that will not happen.”

North continued his resignation letter by saying he believes the NRA should establish a committee to review the organization’s finances, which he said constitute a “clear crisis” that “needs to be dealt with” if the NRA wants to continue to be a viable organization.

When Attorney General William Barr released Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report earlier this month, he was presenting the work of a widely respected former FBI director and federal prosecutor — who happens to be his longtime friend. As Barr himself revealed to lawmakers at his Senate confirmation hearing in January, the two men have had a relationship for years. Their families socialize together, their wives attend Bible study together, and the Muellers were guests at the weddings of Barr’s daughters.

But Barr’s handling of Mueller’s report has cast their relationship in a more adversarial light, and it will be tested further in the coming weeks as Democrats seek separate testimony from both men on the central decisions they made at the culmination of Mueller’s two-year investigation of President Donald Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election. Barr will appear separately before the Senate and House Judiciary Committees on Wednesday and Thursday, with Mueller potentially following later in May.

Former close associates of Mueller see the attorney general’s characterization of his findings — which was generally more favorable to Trump than the report itself — as undercutting the special counsel, if not an outright betrayal. They were particularly put off by Barr’s performance at the press conference he held 90 minutes before releasing the report, which they similarly saw as overly deferential to Trump.

Mueller did not attend, and the attorney general said he didn’t talk to Mueller about his decision to clear Trump of obstruction. “That’s not two friends collaborating collegially on a project,” said Frank Figliuzzi, a former counterintelligence chief at the FBI who briefed Mueller twice a day during their tenure together. “It’s almost worse than undercutting Mueller. It’s saying Mueller’s not even relevant in this.”

When Barr served as attorney general under President George H. W. Bush in 1991 and 1992, Mueller was the assistant attorney general heading up the criminal division. Both Barr and Mueller were in their 40s at the time, and colleagues from that period describe them as exceptionally smart and well-prepared lawyers who shared an easy rapport with each other, as well as a reverence for the Department of Justice. “Bob has always had this real strong desire to see the rule of law vindicated. That’s where the two of them are two peas in a pod,” said Paul McNulty, who served as the department’s chief spokesman in the early 1990s and later oversaw Mueller as deputy attorney general in the George W. Bush administration.

Mueller, a Marine who became a prosecutor, and Barr, who had worked in policy jobs during the Reagan and Bush administrations, were aligned on the tough-on-crime priorities that were in vogue in the early 1990s.

Figliuzzi, however, described Mueller as deferential to Congress’s oversight role.

“I think we’ll see that approach in testimony on the Hill,” Figliuzzi continued. “He won’t necessarily come out and champion a cause without having been asked a question, but when he’s asked the right question, you’ll see him say, ‘Yeah, I don’t understand, nor do I agree with, the attorney general’s characterization of the president cooperating.’”

U.S. Crime, Courts

Fox News, Two more bodies found in Tennessee home, suspect linked to 7 deaths, Nicole Darrah, April 28, 2019. Authorities said Sunday that seven bodies have been discovered at two homes in rural Tennessee, six of them in one location. The bodies were found as investigators continue to process two homes in Westmoreland where the alleged murders took place, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) said. Michael Cummins, 25, was shot and arrested Saturday night after an hours-long manhunt roughly a mile away from one of the crime scenes, according to officials.

The Tennessean reported that Cummins has a lengthy criminal history and most recently pleaded guilty to attempted aggravated arson and aggravated assault in July of last year. He also pleaded guilty to domestic assault in August 2017, as well as theft and evading arrest in April of that year.

Westmoreland is located near the Kentucky border, approximately 40 miles northeast Nashville.

Authorities are working to identify the victims. The Tennessean newspaper reported that a 12-year-old girl was among the dead and that many of the victims were close relatives of the suspect.

April 27

Trump Watch

World Crisis Radio, The Twilight of Trump, Webster G. Tarpley (shown at right), April 27, 2019 (73:10 mins.). The host cites the U.S. Constitution and such commentators as former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, a contender against Trump for the 2020 GOP presidential nomination, and retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, among others, to show opposition to President Trump that includes impeachable offenses. The Peters interview on CNN, Trump's WH departure Will Be Ugly (1:26 mins.), predicted that Trump will fight hard to avoid leaving the White House if he loses re-election and facing likely imprisonment but will lack support in the military or public to create a civil war to defend his power.

Tarpley cited also an April 25 New York Times oped by Elizabeth Drew,"The Danger of Not Impeaching. She argued that Trump has committed "crimes against the Constitution" and so they need not be traditional "crimes" violating statutes. She argued also that impeachment may be risky politically but Congress has a responsibility to act. Her argument:

The decision facing the House Democrats over whether to proceed with an impeachment of President Trump is both more difficult and more consequential than the discussion of it suggests. The arguments offered by House leaders, in particular Speaker Nancy Pelosi, against it are understandable, including that impeachment could invite a wrenching partisan fight; render the party vulnerable to the charge that it’s obsessed with scoring points against Mr. Trump; and distract Democrats from focusing on legislation of more interest to voters.

But the Democrats would also run enormous risks if they didn’t hold to account a president who has clearly abused power and the Constitution, who has not honored the oath of office and who has had a wave of campaign and White House aides plead guilty to or be convicted of crimes.

Also, Tarpley cited an April 18 radio discussion reported by Slate on the show Amicus featuring former Department of Justice spokesman Matt Miller and Fordham law professor Jed Shugerman,moderated by Dahlia Lithwick.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump just made a total mess of the NFL Draft, Bill Palmer, April 27, 2019. This weekend the National Football League held its annual draft of college players, which is supposed to be a fun opportunity for fans to enjoy watching their favorite team get better. This morning Donald Trump decided that he wanted in on the fun, so he began tweeting about it. Naturally, he managed to do it in a horrible way.

Here’s what Donald Trump tweeted this morning: “Congratulations to Nick Bosa on being picked number two in the NFL Draft. You will be a great player for years to come, maybe one of the best. Big Talent! San Francisco will embrace you but most importantly, always stay true to yourself. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” The trouble here is that Nick Bosa was merely the second pick in the draft. Trump decided to completely ignore the first pick in the draft.

Kyler Murray was the first pick. He managed to break new ground, going first overall in the NFL Draft after having also been selected in the first round of the Major League Baseball Draft. Nick Bosa went second in the NFL Draft, and while he’s also a very strong player, he’s best known for his past racist tweets, including an attack on Colin Kaepernick. It goes without saying that Bosa is also an outspoken Trump supporter, because with a racist attitude like that, why wouldn’t he be?

Nick Bosa is a 21 year old kid who has since apologized for his tweets and deleted them. Perhaps he’ll grow up and grow out of it. You can judge him however you want. But he’s not the story here. The story is that the President of the United States made a point of congratulating the second overall pick, a white guy with a racist history, while ignoring the first pick, a black guy. Donald Trump recently bragged about how “transparent” he is. Yep, he’s transparently racist.

Washington Post, Trump to Congress: See you in court, Marc Fisher, April 27, 2019. In politics, as in business, marriage and nearly every aspect of a career spanning five decades, President Trump uses the courts and threats of legal action for self-defense and to punish those who seek to alter the image he has crafted for himself.

Washington Post, White House approves official’s testimony after contempt threat, Rachael Bade, April 27, 2019. The Trump administration has agreed to allow a former White House personnel security director, who House Democrats threatened with contempt, to testify on May 1 — a de-escalation move after President Trump said he would ignore “all the subpoenas.”

White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone sent a letter Friday saying that Carl Kline, the former White House personnel security director, would answer questions for the panel’s investigation of security clearance issues in an on-the-record interview next week.

New York Times, Opinion: Donald Trump Shows a New Level of Contempt for Congress, Editorial Board, April 27, 2019 (print ed.). Many presidents have resisted congressional demands for testimony and documents. But not quite like Mr. Trump. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas.” With this vow to reporters on Wednesday, President Trump laid bare his approach to the concept of congressional oversight. As the Democratic-controlled House ramps up its investigations of his administration, Mr. Trump is throwing up a stone wall.

Washington Post, Opinion: Joe Biden, the master of not quite getting it, Monica Hesse, April 27, 2019 (print ed.). It would have been so much better if, rather than pointing out that times were different, the candidate would apologize for not using the Anita Hill hearing to promote a better understanding of the extent of harassment.

On Thursday, the same day Biden formally announced his candidacy, news broke that he had telephoned Anita Hill — the woman whose 1992 allegations against Clarence Thomas made “sexual harassment” a water-cooler term — to apologize for his role in her ordeal. Only, it wasn’t an apology, exactly. By his campaign’s own language, he called to express “his regret for what she endured.”

Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1992. He presided over the Thomas confirmation hearings. He controlled the flow of questioning; he decided who would or would not be permitted to testify. So when Biden expresses regret for what Hill endured, he’s leaving out a few crucial words: What she endured partly because of him.

• Biden was in charge of the Anita Hill hearing. Even he says it wasn’t fair.

Congress last passed a broad disaster relief package in February 2018, when lawmakers slipped nearly $90 billion into a wide-ranging spending agreement. In the year since, record-breaking natural disasters have ravaged the country: wildfires in California, hurricanes in Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas, and floods across Iowa, Nebraska and much of the rest of the Midwest.

But efforts to wrangle a relief package through Congress — typically a seamless feat of bipartisanship — have repeatedly failed, not because senators do not want to help people like Mr. Cohen, some of whom cannot yet reach their land, but because President Trump does not want to give more money to Puerto Rico.

Democrats are not giving up their effort to increase aid to the island, a United States territory devastated by hurricanes in 2017, as Democratic senators push to match what their House counterparts have already approved. But Senate Republicans, wary of challenging Mr. Trump, say they have acquiesced enough — and unlike the states covered in the package, Puerto Rico has already received some financial aid.

New York Times, Families of Soldiers Killed in Niger in 2017 Are Still Waiting for Answers, Alan Blinder and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, April 27, 2019 (print ed.). About 18 months after four U.S. soldiers died in Niger, the Pentagon has not finished its reviews. The military has not concluded its reckoning over its largest loss of life in combat in Africa since the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” debacle in Somalia. Its inability to settle questions of accountability and punishment have fueled fury and frustration at the highest levels of the Pentagon and left the families of the four dead soldiers to rely on news reports, rumors, back channels and one another to piece together how the Green Beret unit, Team 3212, came under fire.

The military’s account of the 2017 ambush has been halting and inconsistent, in public and in private, since the first days after the firefight, when American commanders benignly described the operation as a routine reconnaissance mission. In fact, the 11-member team, working far from base and lacking air support, was ambushed by more than 100 militants aligned with the Islamic State after superior officers changed its mission to one that carried far greater risks.

Background in 2017:

Washington Post, Trump is now effectively calling a Gold Star widow a liar, despite the White House not backing him up, Aaron Blake, Oct. 23, 2017. The president of the United States effectively called a Gold Star widow a liar Monday morning — an entirely predictable but nonetheless striking moment in American political history. The president has for a week now disputed details of his phone call with the widow, Myeshia Johnson, that were first offered by Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.); on Monday morning, Johnson confirmed that version of events, and in turn drew Trump's tweeted retort.Gold Star widow Myeshia Johnson (via ABC News screenshot).

What's perhaps most remarkable about the president's continued objections, though, is that his own White House isn't doing the same. While Trump has disputed the story — even claiming to have still-yet-to-be-produced “proof” to back it up — the White House has largely seemed to confirm that he said the things he has been accused of saying. They simply argue that they've been misinterpreted.

Nobody has a dementia diagnosis yet, but the first hip and knee replacements are on the horizon. So are wheelchair ramps, sleep apnea breathing masks, grab bars on cell walls and, perhaps, dialysis. Hospice care is on the agenda.

More than 17 years after choosing the American military base in Cuba as “the least worst place” to incarcerate prisoners from the battlefield in Afghanistan, after years of impassioned debates over the rights of the detainees and whether the prison could close, the Pentagon is now planning for terrorism suspects still held in the facility to grow old and die at Guantánamo Bay.

With the Obama administration’s effort to close the prison having been blocked by Congress and the Trump administration committed to keeping it open, and with military trials inching ahead at a glacial pace, commanders were told last year to draw up plans to keep the detention center going for another 25 years, through 2043.

Sri Lankan Terror Attacks

Washington Post, 9 adults, 6 children dead in Sri Lankan raid on suspected terrorists’ home, Joanna Slater​, April 27, 2019. Three bombs exploded in the house and a gun battle broke out as security forces closed in late Friday. Authorities said those killed were connected to the suicide bombers who carried out attacks on churches and luxury hotels in three cities on Easter Sunday, killing more than 250.

First Donald Trump walked away from a second round of nuclear talks with Kim Jong Un in Vietnam. Now all the traditional powers of northeast Asia—China, Japan, Russia, South Korea—are muscling in to try to assert themselves as more than peripheral actors in this drama.

This week alone, Russian President Vladimir Putin met Kim for the first time in the Russian city of Vladivostok and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met Trump at the White House, advocating polar opposite agendas for how to proceed in addressing the North Korean nuclear program.

Trump Probes

New York Times, Maria Butina Sentenced for Role in Russian Influence Campaign, Sharon LaFraniere and Eileen Sullivan, April 27, 2019 (print ed.). The Russian graduate student who ran a secret operation to influence conservative Americans was sentenced on Friday to 18 months in prison, ending what prosecutors called a lengthy effort to create inroads with officials potentially useful to Russia in the future.

The woman, Maria Butina, 30 (shown in a mugshot at right and as a student below left), pleaded guilty late last year to conspiring to act as a foreign agent, admitting that she was part of an organized Russian effort to create unofficial lines of communication between Russia and influential Republicans.

Prosecutors initially described her as a charming operative who had traded sex for access to powerful conservative circles, including the National Rifle Association, though they later acknowledged being “mistaken” on the most salacious aspect of those accusations. Ms. Butina’s legal team said she was an ambitious, well-meaning graduate student who just wanted to improve relations between the United States and Russia.

Judge Tanya S. Chutkan (below at right) of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia accepted the prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation, saying Ms. Butina’s conduct “was a threat to our country’s democratic institutions.” She added, “This was no simple misunderstanding by an overeager foreign student.”

In a court filing, Robert Anderson Jr. a retired F.B.I. counterintelligence official, said Ms. Butina was engaged in a typical “spot-and-assess” effort to identify Americans who could become targets for Russian intelligence.

“Butina provided the Russian Federation with information that skilled intelligence officers can exploit for years and that may cause significant damage to the United States,” Mr. Anderson wrote. He said efforts like hers help Russians identify midlevel targets who lack direct access to classified or sensitive information but whose government or political connections could potentially be exploited.

New York Times, Biden Is Running for President, After Months of Hesitation, Alexander Burns, April 26, 2019 (print ed.). Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has stayed on the sideline while his record has been scrutinized. His entry has the potential to reshape the Democratic primary contest.

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., right, announced Thursday that he would seek the Democratic nomination to challenge President Trump in 2020, marshaling his experience and global stature in a bid to lead a party increasingly defined by a younger generation that might be skeptical of his age and ideological moderation.

Mr. Biden, 76, is set to offer himself as a levelheaded leader for a country wracked by political conflict, a rationale he believes could attract a broad cross-section of voters who want to move on from Mr. Trump. In a three-and-a-half minute video laying out his reasons for running, Mr. Biden chose not to talk about policy issues or his biography but instead began by recalling the white supremacist march through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and a counterprotest, and Mr. Trump’s comment that there were “very fine people on both sides.” In that moment, Mr. Biden said, “I knew the threat to our nation was unlike any I’d ever seen in my lifetime.”

A young lad was tortured with electricity and beheaded in Saudi Arabia because he sent WhatsApp messages about a protest aged 16. Abdulkarim al-Hawaj, 21, was a schoolboy when he was detained and accused of being a "terrorist" for sending texts online about an anti-government demonstration. He was a Shiite Muslim - which is a persecuted minority group in Sunni-dominated Saudi - living in the troubled Eastern province.

Abdulkarim was beaten and tortured with electricity while his hands were chained above his head when he “confessed” to his crimes, human rights charity Reprieve said.

According to Amnesty International, his trial was a farce because he was denied access to a proper defence lawyer and convicted on the forced confession. Aside from torture, the charity also claims that his captors threatened to kill his family if did not confess to the crimes.

This week, he had his head cut from his body in front of a baying, bloodthirsty crowd along with 36 other men in the medieval country.

Sentencing a person to death who is aged under 18 is banned under international law.

Another victim, Mujtaba al-Sweikat, left, was a teenager who was set to start a new life in the US, studying at Western Michigan University, when he was arrested for attending an anti-government protest.

The then-17-year-old – who had enrolled in English language and finance - was badly beaten including on the soles of his feet before he “confessed” to crimes against the state.

Human rights charities claim he was also tortured into confessing and convicted in a "sham trial." Despite his university protesting his sentence, insisting he had “great promise,” Mujtaba was also beheaded this week.

Reuters, U.N. rights boss condemns Saudi Arabia's beheading of 37 men, Stephanie Nebehay and Sylvia Westall, April 24, 2019. The U.N. human rights chief on Wednesday condemned the beheadings of 37 Saudi nationals across the kingdom this week, saying most were minority Shi’ite Muslims who may not have had fair trials and at least three were minors when sentenced.

Saudi Arabia, which said on Tuesday it had carried out the executions over terrorism crimes, has come under increasing global scrutiny over its human rights record since the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year at the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate and the detention of women’s rights activists.

“It is particularly abhorrent that at least three of those killed were minors at the time of their sentencing,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said in a statement issued in Geneva.

She said United Nations rapporteurs had expressed concern about a lack of due process and fair trial guarantees amid allegations that confessions were obtained through torture.

Amnesty International said late on Tuesday the majority of those executed in six cities belonged to the Shi’ite minority and were convicted after “sham trials”, included at least 14 people who had participated in anti-government protests in the kingdom’s oil-rich Eastern Province in 2011-2012.

It said in a statement that one of them, Abdulkareem al-Hawaj, was arrested when he was 16, making his execution a “flagrant violation of international law”.

London-based Amnesty said 11 of those executed had been convicted of spying for the kingdom’s arch-adversary, Shi’ite Muslim Iran, and sentenced to death in 2016.

The Shi’ite-majority Eastern Province became a focal point of unrest in early 2011 with demonstrations calling for an end to discrimination and for reforms in the Sunni Muslim monarchy. Saudi Arabia denies any discrimination against Shi’ites.

Trump Probes

Palmer Report, Opinion: Welcome to uncharted territory, Bill Palmer, April 26, 2019. Donald Trump, in a last ditch effort to salvage his illegitimate and dying presidency, decided this week that the constitutional powers given to Congress no longer exist. He’s instructed all of his Executive Branch officials to simply ignore any requests, demands, or subpoenas that come from the House of Representatives. If he manages to pull it off, there no longer is a Constitution.

We can debate if it’s part of some kind of perverse reelection strategy, if he’s doing this simply because he’s maniacally out of control and bent on self destruction. Either way, he’s forcing the House to impeach him, which will happen rather soon. The particularly tricky part is that the House has to put together a case for impeachment, and Trump is actively trying to prevent that from happening. Of course, in so doing, he’s only making the case for impeachment even stronger – and he’s handing House Democrats additional leverage when it comes to dismantling him.

Because Donald Trump is now taking his obstruction of justice to such cartoonishly criminal fashion, House Democrats are preparing to have his regime’s officials arrested if they continue following Trump’s illegal orders to defy congressional subpoenas. We’re now entering that deep dark territory where government officials have to start arresting each other in the hope of keeping the basic tenets of our democracy intact.

The stakes are even higher than you might think. The Mueller report not only lays out the proof that Donald Trump committed a double digit number of felonies, it also explicitly spells out that Trump can be criminally prosecuted for them once he’s no longer in office. That means Trump will be arrested and indicted the minute he’s out of office. He knows it too. He’s single handedly trying to burn our democracy to the ground, in the hope of keeping himself out of prison.

OpEdNews, Opinion: Jail Them For Contempt of Congress, Rob Kall, April 26, 2019. There is a growing list of Trump appointees and administration people who are refusing to subpoenas to appear before congress. Trump is stonewalling and saying there will be no cooperation. It is time to show Trump and the American people that the Democrats were elected to control the House for a reason, and that they are going to do their job.

They must begin arresting, imprisoning and fining the people who refuse to show up and testify. And they should do it soon, before the American public thinks they are too weak and do not have the strength to do the job.

The deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, attacked the Obama administration, former law enforcement officials, the press and his own critics in a fiery speech on Thursday night that he used to defend his handling of the Russia investigation.

Mr. Rosenstein, who appointed the special counsel to take over the inquiry after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director in May 2017, sought to separate himself from the consequential decisions made about the inquiry before he oversaw it. He blamed the previous administration for doing too little to publicize Russia’s campaign to sabotage the 2016 election while it was underway, and he called out the F.B.I. and Congress for leaks about the case.

“The previous administration chose not to publicize the full story about Russian computer hackers and social media trolls, and how they relate to a broader strategy to undermine America,” Mr. Rosenstein said. He left unmentioned that Republican congressional leaders urged former President Barack Obama to keep quiet about the Kremlin’s operation during the presidential race.

During dinner remarks where he was honored at the Yale Club in Manhattan, Mr. Rosenstein also noted that the F.B.I. had disclosed classified evidence about the investigation to lawmakers and that Mr. Trump had asked Mr. Comey early in 2017 to end an investigation into his national security adviser at the time, Michael T. Flynn.

“Then the former F.B.I. director alleged that the president pressured him to close the investigation, and the president denied that that conversation occurred,” Mr. Rosenstein said. He went beyond the account of Mr. Comey — who has said the president asked him only to end the Flynn inquiry, not the entire Russia investigation — and suggested that he did not know who was telling the truth. The special counsel’s report cited Mr. Comey as a credible witness in the matter.

“So that happened,” Mr. Rosenstein added.

He commended the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for conducting a thorough investigation into Russia’s 2016 meddling, joking darkly about the attacks he endured for appointing Mr. Mueller.

“Today, our nation is safer, elections are more secure, and citizens are better informed about covert foreign influence schemes,” Mr. Rosenstein said. “But not everybody was happy with my decision, in case you did not notice.”

Washington Post, ‘I can land the plane’: How Rod Rosenstein tried to mollify Trump, protect Mueller and save his job, Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett, ​April 26, 2019. The deputy attorney general has walked a political tightrope between an often angry president and critics who say his actions have been too protective of the White House. Rod J. Rosenstein, again, was in danger of losing his job. The New York Times had just reported that — in the heated days after James B. Comey was fired as FBI director — the deputy attorney general had suggested wearing a wire to surreptitiously record President Trump. Now Trump, traveling in New York, was on the phone, eager for an explanation.

Rosenstein — who, by one account, had gotten teary-eyed just before the call in a meeting with Trump’s chief of staff — sought to defuse the volatile situation and assure the president he was on his team, according to people familiar with matter. He criticized the Times report, published in late September, and blamed it on former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, whose recollections formed its basis. Then he talked about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and told the president he would make sure Trump was treated fairly, people familiar with the conversation said.

“I give the investigation credibility,” Rosenstein said, in the words of one administration official offering their own characterization of the call. “I can land the plane.”

Trump's June Visit To UK

The Hill, Jeremy Corbyn to skip Trump state dinner in UK, Rachel Frazin, April 26, 2019. British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said Friday that he will skip an upcoming state dinner with President Trump. "[British Prime Minister] Theresa May should not be rolling out the red carpet for a state visit to honour a President who rips up vital international treaties, backs climate change denial and uses racist and misogynist rhetoric," Corbyn said in a statement.

He added that maintaining a good relationship with the U.S. does not "require the pomp and ceremony of a State Visit" and expressed disappointment in May's willingness to "kowtow" to the Trump administration.

“I would welcome a meeting with President Trump to discuss all matters of interest,” Corbyn (shown in a file photo) said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Corbyn's statement.

Other prominent British politicians, including House of Commons Speaker John Bercow and Liberal Democrat party leader Sir Vince Cable, have also declined invitations to the state dinner, according to the BBC.

The White House announced Tuesday that Trump had accepted Queen Elizabeth II's invitation for a state visit in June. He is scheduled to participate in a meeting with May and attend D-Day anniversary ceremonies commemorating the Allied invasion of Europe during World War II.

The Pentagon is preparing to loosen rules that bar troops from interacting with migrants entering the United States, expanding the military’s involvement in President Trump’s operation along the southern border.

Senior Defense Department officials have recommended that acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan approve a new request from the Department of Homeland Security to provide military lawyers, cooks and drivers to assist with handling a surge of migrants along the southern border.

The move would require authorizing waivers for about 300 troops to a long-standing policy prohibiting military personnel from coming into contact with migrants.

To cast doubt on her sexual harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee planned to ask her about a former acquaintance named John Doggett, who said in an affidavit that Hill was prone to romantic delusions and had “a problem being rejected by men she was attracted to.”

Doggett had not been vetted by the committee, as the rules of the hearing required, and Biden said it would be best not to air his claims until aides interviewed him. But as Republicans applied pressure, Biden was unsure what to do — changing his mind five times as colleagues, witnesses and a national television audience watched.

Biden’s handling of Hill’s allegations against Thomas and the hearings they incited in 1991 remains one of the most revealing and controversial episodes of his career. In an era when bipartisan support for Supreme Court nominees was more common, the senator from Delaware wanted to run a process that was seen as fair by both sides.

But for decades, Democrats have been angered by Hill’s treatment by the GOP and conflicted about Biden’s performance as chairman. The issue has even more resonance for some Democrats now in the wake of allegations of sexual assault against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh last year, which led to a similar hearing. Both he and Thomas denied wrongdoing.

Interviews with a dozen people with firsthand knowledge and a review of the written record and interviews published with participants over the past three decades reinforce that Biden failed to use the powers afforded to Senate committee chairmen to conduct a judicious and thorough inquiry into Hill’s allegations. He did not give full consideration to witnesses whose allegations seemed to corroborate her testimony or curb the attacks and innuendo leveled at her during the hearing. A former Biden lawyer told The Washington Post this month that the Democrats were outmaneuvered by Republicans, whose purpose was to damage Hill.

Biden called Hill earlier this month to express regrets over her experience, but Hill was unsatisfied with the conversation and did not characterize his comments as an apology, the New York Times reported Thursday. Hill did not respond to calls and emails about their conversation, and Biden’s campaign told the Times it would have no further comment.

The former Biden lawyer, Cynthia Hogan, said in an interview that he approached his role during the Thomas hearings as if he were a neutral arbiter.

“What happened is we got really politically outplayed by the Republicans,” said Hogan, now vice president for public policy for Americas at Apple. “They came with a purpose, and that purpose was to destroy Anita Hill. Democrats did not coordinate and they did not prepare for battle. I think he would say that that’s what should be done differently.”

Keith Henderson, a friend of Hill’s who spent time with her as the hearings unfolded, wondered in an interview this month why Biden had not personally apologized to her.

More On U.S. Courts

National Public Radio, Kansas Supreme Court Rules State Constitution Protects Right To Abortion, Dan Margolies and Celia Llopis-Jepsen, April 26, 2019. The Kansas Constitution protects a woman's right to an abortion, the state Supreme Court ruled Friday. The landmark ruling now stands as the law of the land in Kansas with no path for an appeal. Because it turns on the state's Constitution, abortion would remain legal in Kansas even if the Roe v. Wade case that established a national right to abortion is ever reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The decision turbocharged efforts among conservative legislators to ask voters to add an abortion ban to the Kansas Constitution. Lawmakers return to the capital, Topeka, next week.

The decision, in which one of the seven justices dissented, cites in its first sentence the first section of the Kansas Constitution's Bill of Rights: "All men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

The decision continues: "We are now asked: 'Is this declaration of rights more than an idealized aspiration? And, if so, do the substantive rights include a woman's right to make decisions about her body, including the decision whether to continue her pregnancy? We answer these questions, 'Yes.' "

New York Times, Fake Heiress Who Swindled New York’s Elite Is Found Guilty, Jan Ransom and Emily Palmer, April 25, 2019. If New York is a city of dreams, Anna Sorokin had plenty of them. Ms. Sorokin, a Russian immigrant from a middle-class family, longed to be a member of the upper echelon of Manhattan society. She elbowed her way into the city’s bustling social scene and tried to raise money to open a members-only arts club on Park Avenue South.

To friends and those wanting to do business with her, there was no reason to believe she was not the person she said she was — a wealthy German heiress with a taste for the high life.

For years, she had played the part, and looked it, too. Ms. Sorokin, they said, swindled $275,000 from the rich and the unsuspecting — including friends and financial institutions — to pay for the luxurious lifestyle she so desperately desired.

On Thursday, a jury convicted Ms. Sorokin, 28, of most of the charges against her, including second-degree grand larceny, theft of services and one count of first-degree attempted grand larceny. She faces up to 15 years in prison on the second-degree grand larceny charge.

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Opinion: There's a middle ground between impeachment hearings and waiting for 2020, Wayne Madsen (author, syndicated newspaper columnist, former Navy intelligence officer), April 25, 2019 (subscription required). There are three schools of thought in the Congress on impeaching Donald Trump. Overlooked is the option chosen by past sessions of the Senate and House to address specific issues: creation of a House Select Committee to Investigate Presidential Abuse of Office and Other Matters.

Our election was corrupted, our democracy assaulted, our sovereignty and security violated. This is the definitive conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report. It documents a serious crime against the American people.

The debate about how to respond to Russia’s “sweeping and systematic” attack — and how to hold President Trump accountable for obstructing the investigation and possibly breaking the law — has been reduced to a false choice: immediate impeachment or nothing. History suggests there’s a better way to think about the choices ahead.

Obviously, this is personal for me, and some may say I’m not the right messenger. But my perspective is not just that of a former candidate and target of the Russian plot. I am also a former senator and secretary of state who served during much of Vladi­mir Putin’s ascent, sat across the table from him and knows firsthand that he seeks to weaken our country.

I am also someone who, by a strange twist of fate, was a young staff attorney on the House Judiciary Committee’s Watergate impeachment inquiry in 1974, as well as first lady during the impeachment process that began in 1998. And I was a senator for New York after 9/11, when Congress had to respond to an attack on our country. Each of these experiences offers important lessons for how we should proceed today.

First, like in any time our nation is threatened, we have to remember that this is bigger than politics. What our country needs now is clear-eyed patriotism, not reflexive partisanship.

Whether they like it or not, Republicans in Congress share the constitutional responsibility to protect the country. Mueller’s report leaves many unanswered questions — in part because of Attorney General William P. Barr’s redactions and obfuscations. But it is a road map. It’s up to members of both parties to see where that road map leads — to the eventual filing of articles of impeachment, or not. Either way, the nation’s interests will be best served by putting party and political considerations aside and being deliberate, fair and fearless.

An ex-aide to Chris Christie convicted of helping cause massive traffic delays on the nation’s busiest bridge to punish a political adversary attacked the former New Jersey governor ahead of her sentencing Wednesday, alleging in an interview that Christie knew in advance there would be lane closures because she had told him.

“I’m angry,” Bridget Kelly, Christie’s former deputy chief of staff for legislative and intergovernmental affairs, told The Washington Post before a judge sentenced her to 13 months in prison. “I think that he knew that I would be an easy target, and I’m wildly disappointed. I’m so angry at myself for trusting these people. I’m so angry at myself for not asking more questions. I find it really unfortunate.”

Kelly spoke to The Post a day before she was sentenced again for her role in a 2013 episode that has come to be known as “Bridgegate.” The incident led to hours-long delays for many commuters in the New York metropolitan region.

Federal prosecutors have asserted that lane closures on the George Washington Bridge, which spans the Hudson River, connecting northern New Jersey and Manhattan, were meant to create a traffic jam. It was retaliation against Fort Lee, N.J., Mayor Mark Sokolich for not supporting Christie’s reelection bid, prosecutors said.

Kelly and another Christie ally, William E. Baroni Jr., then a top official with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, were convicted in 2016 of conspiring to misuse Port Authority property. David Wildstein (shown above with Kelly), another former Port Authority executive, pleaded guilty in the case.

Christie was never charged, although Kelly testified — and prosecutors asserted — that he knew of the plan. Christie continues to deny that.

Inside DC: Contempt For Heartland?

New York Times, Opinion: Armpits, White Ghettos and Contempt, Paul Krugman, April 25, 2019. Who really despises the American heartland? “If you live in the Midwest, where else do you want to live besides Chicago? You don’t want to live in Cincinnati or Cleveland or, you know, these armpits of America.” So declared Stephen Moore, the man Donald Trump wants to install on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, during a 2014 event held at a think tank called, yes, the Heartland Institute.

The crowd laughed.

Moore is an indefensible choice on many grounds. Even if he hadn’t shown himself to be extraordinarily misogynistic and have an ugly personal history, his track record on economics — always wrong, never admitting error or learning from it — is utterly disqualifying.

His remarks about the Midwest, however, highlight more than his unsuitability for the Fed. They also provide an illustration of something I’ve been noticing for a while: The thinly veiled contempt conservative elites feel for the middle-American voters they depend on.

This is not the story you usually hear. On the contrary, we’re inundated with claims that liberals feel disdain for the heartland. Even liberals themselves often buy into these claims, berate themselves for having been condescending and pledge to do better.

But what’s the source of that narrative? Look at where the belief that liberals don’t respect the heartland comes from, and it turns out that it has little to do with things Democrats actually say, let alone their policies. It is, instead, a story line pushed relentlessly by Fox News and other propaganda organizations, relying on out-of-context quotes and sheer fabrication.

New York Times, Some Ukraine Jews Are Unhappy a Jew Was Elected President, Andrew Higgins, April 25, 2019 (print ed.). Anti-Semitism is not the scourge it once was in Ukraine, but some Jews fear becoming targets as their prominence grows. When Volodymyr Zelensky (right), the Jewish comedian recently elected the president of Ukraine, announced that he was running, the chief rabbi for the eastern Ukrainian region where Mr. Zelensky grew up was shocked by the hostile reaction.

But the opposition, Rabbi Shmuel Kaminezki said, did not come from the Orthodox Church, a bastion of anti-Semitism in the past, or from a Ukrainian nationalist movement that collaborated with the Nazis during Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Instead, the hostility came from Mr. Zelensky’s fellow Jews, both secular and religious, for whom painful memories of czarist-era pogroms and the Holocaust are still very much alive.

Despite its scarred history, Ukraine today is no hotbed of anti-Semitism. It already has a Jewish prime minister, Volodymyr Groysman, and if he stays on after Mr. Zelensky is sworn in, Ukraine will be the only country outside of Israel where the heads of state and government are Jewish.

On Wednesday, Facebook said the fine, which it recorded as a “legal expense,” could ultimately range between $3 billion and $5 billion.

The potential fine would represent the largest privacy-related civil penalty the FTC has imposed. The sheer size of the legal expense — more than 100 times greater than the previous largest fine imposed on a technology company — could reset the baseline for future privacy investigations, putting the United States on par with Europe in its willingness to go after technology firms.

U.S. Crime, Courts

Convicted murderer Daniel Beckwitt (shown in a mug shot at left) and victim Askia Khafra, shown in a family photo.

“The Court cannot issue any determinative finding on the issue of whether or not Plaintiffs have standing without taking the risk that such a ruling may result in potentially devastating national security consequences,” U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White wrote in his ruling on Thursday.

The suit, filed in 2008, alleged that the snooping — eventually named the Terrorist Surveillance Program by the Bush administration — violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution as well as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The effort is known to have included a massive database of telephone calls placed and received by Americans, although the full scope of the surveillance remains classified. The Bush, Obama and now Trump administrations have all invoked state-secrets claims to try to shut down the litigation.

The case has a long and circuitous history in the courts. Brought by the digital-rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, the suit was dismissed in 2009 by a previous judge who said the plaintiffs lacked sufficient proof to establish that they were surveilled. The case was later reinstated by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

White previously ruled that the plaintiffs were unable to prove standing to pursue their Fourth Amendment claims without exposing state secrets. In the ruling Thursday, he said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act claims also could not proceed because there was no way to publicly discuss the way the program might have affected the plaintiffs without getting into highly classified information.

White received extensive secret briefing and evidence from Justice Department attorneys before issuing his ruling Thursday, which included a classified section that was not released.

Lawyers challenging the surveillance hoped their case would be buoyed by a ruling from the 9th Circuit in February in another long-running suit related to an undercover FBI operation focused on Southern California mosques.

But White, who was appointed by Bush, ruled that case was not of much relevance to the one over the warrantless wiretapping.

Inside DC

Washington Post, Opinion: Stephen Moore needs a vacation from women, Dana Milbank, April 25, 2019 (print ed.). Stephen Moore, one of President Trump’s many exotic picks to staff the federal government, declared this week that his opponents are “pulling a Kavanaugh against me.”

Moore (below at left), Trump’s pick for the Federal Reserve Board, is so convinced he is being treated like Brett Kavanaugh, whose Supreme Court confirmation was marred by sexual-misconduct allegations, that he reportedly hired a PR firm that helped Kavanaugh.

But there is a key difference. In Moore’s case, the enemy is . . . Moore — specifically, what he wrote 15 to 20 years ago for conservative outlets such as National Review.

Now CNN, the New York Times and others are reprinting Moore’s greatest hits, including his joke about how he potty-trained his son by “pasting a photo of Hillary Clinton with a bullseye target on the bottom of the potty.” And his hilarious tale about showing his children pictures of the “mangled and bloody” corpses of Saddam Hussein’s sons with the message “THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO KIDS THAT GROW UP TO BE DEMOCRATS!” And the riotous bit about him “hitting on” a “gorgeous 20-something blond,” then telling his concerned son “how nice it would be if you had a much younger mommy.”

In other writings, Moore defended misbehavior on college campuses: “If [women] were so oppressed and offended by drunken, lustful frat boys, why is it that on Friday nights they showed up in droves in tight skirts to the keg parties?” He reserved particular derision for his wife. After she voted Democratic, he wrote: “Women are sooo malleable! No wonder there’s a gender gap.”'

Moore is now divorced from her — and was held in contempt of court in 2013 for failing to pay more than $300,000 in child support. There’s a tax lien against his home because he owes the Internal Revenue Service $75,000.

In other words, Moore should fit in perfectly with his fellow Trump appointees.

April 24

Trump Defies Congress, Constitution?

Washington Post, Trump says he is opposed to White House aides testifying to Congress, Robert Costa, Tom Hamburger, Josh Dawsey and Rosalind S. Helderman​, April 24, 2019 (print ed.). The president’s comments came as the White House indicated it would broadly defy requests for information from the House, moving the two branches of government closer to a constitutional collision.

It was not clear how Trump would legally justify such a move, which he mentioned only briefly in morning tweets in which he lashed out at Democrats who are continuing to investigate him following the release of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report.

“I DID NOTHING WRONG,” Trump wrote. “If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court. Not only are there no ‘High Crimes and Misdemeanors,’ there are no Crimes by me at all.”

The notion was ridiculed by several legal experts, including Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, who accused Trump of “idiocy.”

The Trump administration also plans to oppose other requests from House committees for the testimony of current and former aides about actions in the White House described in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report, according to two people familiar with internal thinking who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke of the plans on the condition of anonymity.

White House lawyers plan to tell attorneys for administration witnesses called by the House that they will be asserting executive privilege over their testimony, officials said.

New York Times, Sri Lanka Calls Bombers ‘Well Educated’ and Warns of Ongoing Threat, Kai Schultz, April 24, 2019. Sri Lanka’s president asked two top security officials to resign, amid anger that the government had ignored multiple warnings that churches could be attacked — one of which came just hours before the bombings Sunday. One lawmaker called for the two officials to be arrested and prosecuted.

• The American ambassador warned of “ongoing terrorist plots,” and a Sri Lankan official said people involved in the bombings could still be at large.

Nine suicide bombers from mostly educated, middle-class backgrounds carried out the attacks in Sri Lanka that killed more than 350 people on Easter Sunday, the authorities said on Wednesday as they warned of an ongoing terrorist threat and continued making arrests.

The bombers, one of whom was a woman, were all Sri Lankan, officials said. But the authorities were continuing to investigate whether the Islamic State, which on Tuesday claimed responsibility for the coordinated blasts, had provided more than symbolic support, such as by training the attackers or building the bombs.

Washington Post, Sri Lanka blasts were in retaliation for New Zealand mosque shootings, official says, Joanna Slater, Amantha Perera and Shibani Mahtani, April 24, 2019 (print ed.). The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Easter bombings that killed at least 321 people. Earlier, Sri Lanka's defense minister said initial investigations show the attacks were in response to the Christchurch mosque shootings that left 50 people dead last month.

2020 Presidential Politics

Washington Post, Opinion: Is Bernie Sanders serious? Jennifer Rubin, April 24, 2019. It’s the first big misstep of the 2020 Democratic primary season. A candidate with an obvious liability hands opponents a powerful, easy-to-grasp issue that reveals the candidate really cannot be trusted as the party’s standard-bearer in an election that simply cannot be lost.

I’m talking about Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt, shown above in a JIP photo.) and the jaw-dropping suggestion that serious felons still in prison should get to vote. The Post reports:

A questioner at a CNN town hall Monday night asked the presidential candidate whether he believes that incarcerated felons — the Boston Marathon bomber, for instance, or sex offenders — should be allowed to vote while they are serving their sentences.

Sanders’s answer: an unapologetic “yes.”

“I think the right to vote is inherent to our democracy — yes, even for terrible people — because once you start chipping away … you’re running down a slippery slope,” Sanders said. “I do believe that even if they are in jail paying their price to society, that should not take away their inherent American right to participate in our democracy.”

Let’s stop there for a moment. Sanders is saying that we as a society are incapable of differentiating between a felon in prison and one who has paid his debt. Really? It sure seems like a simple, bright line.

One is inclined to conclude that Sanders is either pandering in a desperate way to compensate for his poor showing among African American voters in 2016 or that he lacks rudimentary common sense.

To no one’s surprise, Sanders immediately came under withering attack from Republicans on an issue for which there is no significant support even within the Democratic Party.

In an election in which Democrats are desperate to win, this episode should serve as big red flag. (“Sanders has been working to persuade Democrats he can defeat President Trump, but Monday’s remarks could give pause to some of the voters he would need to win over.” To put it mildly.)

Founded in 2014 by muckraking national security journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, the Intercept is still best-known for its first incarnation as an obsessive anti-surveillance reporting enterprise, and an activist voice for privacy and civil liberties—more anti-government than partisan. It built its reputation by publishing stories based on top-secret National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden; it also exposed the controversial U.S. drone strike program and revealed how a British intelligence agency sought to digitally surveil every Internet user.

But as it gears up for 2020, the Intercept faces some big questions. One is whether its owner supports the war it is waging. The Intercept is almost totally funded by a single billionaire backer, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar (right), who supports the site through parent organization First Look Media. Omidyar, who through a spokesperson declined to comment for this story, appears to live in a different political reality from his own publication. Intercept links are noticeably absent from his Twitter feed, which is filled with reflections on a supposed Trump-Russia conspiracy — pitting Omidyar against Intercept co-founding editor and columnist Greenwald, a deep skeptic of the media’s coverage of the Russia scandal.

And unlike the heroes of the Intercept’s political coverage, Omidyar isn’t some left-wing outsider; he’s a mainstream Democratic donor and was even a supporter of the conservative “Never Trump” super PAC. Several people I spoke to — sources inside the company and other media observers — are now asking: How much longer will the billionaire patron bankroll a news outlet so clearly at odds with his own politics?

The Markup raised more than $23 million in funding, a testament to the reputation that Ms. Angwin, the site’s editor in chief, and another of its founders, Jeff Larson, had established through their work at ProPublica, which they left last year. But on Monday evening, Ms. Angwin was fired from The Markup via email, just months before the site’s planned July start date. On Tuesday, five of the site’s seven editorial staff members resigned, citing her dismissal as the reason.

April 23

New York Times, Sri Lanka Failed to Act on Warnings About Terrorist Group, Jeffrey Gettleman, Mujib Mashal and Dharisha Bastians, April 23, 2019 (print ed.). Intelligence Pointed to Planned Attack by Radical Islamists. In the days before Sunday’s suicide attacks, the country’s security agencies had been closely watching a cell of the National Thowheeth Jama’ath. But the government’s history of bitter infighting appears to have contributed to a devastating security blunder that led to the deaths of nearly 300 people.

Washington Post, Islamist militants blamed for Sri Lanka bombings that killed at least 290, Joanna Slater, Amantha Perera and Shibani Mahtani​, April 23, 2019 (print ed.). The government accused the National Thowheed Jamaath of being behind the blasts at churches and hotels. Sri Lanka’s health minister called for a police official to resign, saying agencies were warned of possible attacks. Police made 21 arrests.

Explosions at churches and hotels in Sri Lanka (shown with a green dot at the center of the world map at right) killed 290 people and injured more than 500 Sunday. This is what we know so far:

● The government says the attack was carried out by the National Thowheed Jamaath, a local Islamist militant group, with suspected international assistance.

● Sri Lanka’s president has asked for international assistance in tracking down the group’s foreign connections.

Supreme Court Hears Census Case

New York Times, On Census Citizenship Question, Supreme Court’s Conservatives Appear United, Adam Liptak, right, April 23, 2019. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed ready on Tuesday to allow the Trump administration to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census, which critics say would undermine its accuracy by discouraging both legal and unauthorized immigrants from filling out the forms.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that adding the question would do damage to the fundamental purpose of the census, which is to count everyone in the nation.

“There is no doubt that people will respond less,” she said. “That has been proven in study after study.”

By one government estimate, about 6.5 million people might not be counted. The federal government has long gathered information about citizenship. But since 1950, it has not included a question about it in the census forms sent once a decade to each household. Adding it could reduce Democratic representation when congressional districts are allocated in 2021 and affect how hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending are distributed.

Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco, representing the Trump administration, acknowledged that the question could depress participation. But he said the information it would yield was valuable.

The new inquiry, which the office confirmed in an April 18 letter to the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, is looking into senior Interior officials, including Assistant Secretary for Insular and International Affairs Doug Domenech, White House liaison Lori Mashburn, three top staffers at the Office of Intergovernmental and External Affairs, and the department’s former energy policy adviser. The Campaign Legal Center detailed the officials’ actions in a Feb. 20 letter to the inspector general’s office, suggesting a probe is warranted.

Bannon has admitted that he is following George Soros’s global playbook. Instead of a neo-liberal network, like that of Soros, Bannon is creating a far-right political movement in Europe that will extend its tentacles around the world.

There are many politicians and pundits who are only focusing on the idea that impeachment in the house is only meaningful if the senate finishes the job and removes Trump. That's just so wrong.

Some thoughts:

First, keep the hell away from anything to do with Russia. Trump is guilty of obstruction of justice. That is huge and it is enough. He is guilty of forcing security clearances for people who were not worthy. It appears he is preventing a full-throated defense of our election system from foreign influence and interference, And he may be guilty of violating the emoluments clause. Probably. Then there are Trump's personal and corporate taxes. There's almost certainly a huge treasure trove there.

That is enough of a shopping list to go after. There may be more and it is worth exploring the other possibilities.

it will take well over a year for the battles between the House Democrats and Donald Trump to work their way through. It is already a sh*t show and it will get worse. It will show Trump and his appointees for what they are-- corrupt, dishonest, exploiting their roles in government, totally disrespecting the law and the constitution. If the Republican in the Senate and the SCOTUS do as expected, they will enable this corruption. That will come across loud and clear to the independents and Republicans who are not blinded by cultish loyalty to Trump-- and there are millions of them.

Even if Mitch McConnell and his band of traitorous colleagues block conviction in the Senate, the nation and the world will convict Trump in their hearts. That will only happen if the House proceeds with hearings and investigations.

The good news is that it appears that the idea of investigations and hearings IS on the table. Call them investigation hearings or impeachment hearings, either way, they are a good thing.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Nancy Pelosi just subtly committed herself to impeaching Donald Trump, Bill Palmer, April 23, 2019. When the Democratic chairs of the three most influential House committees all began talking openly about the possibility of impeachment this past weekend, Palmer Report pointed out that they wouldn’t be doing this without the blessing of their boss, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Sure enough, now Pelosi is talking impeachment herself – and in fact she’s taking it further than the three committee chairs.

Here’s what Nancy Pelosi said about impeachment to House Democrats during a conference call on Monday, according to USA Today: “If that’s the place the facts take us, that’s the place we have to go.” This quote is carefully worded, to say the least. But make no mistake here. Pelosi just said that if the facts end up calling for impeachment, then House Democrats “have” to impeach Donald Trump. The crucial part here is that Pelosi already knows where the facts are going to take us.

To be clear, Pelosi doesn’t appear to have any interest in rushing into impeachment, or at least rushing into calling it impeachment. She also said this during the conference call: “Whether it’s articles of impeachment or investigations, it’s the same obtaining of facts. We don’t have to go to articles of impeachment to obtain the facts, the presentation of facts.” This is in line with Palmer Report’s premise that the next month or so of public hearings is going to look the same whether they’re calling it “impeachment” or not.

So now we’re at a place where Nancy Pelosi, who will ultimately be the one to make the decision, is committing herself to impeaching Donald Trump if the upcoming public testimony from people like Robert Mueller and Don McGahn ends up laying out the kinds of evidence that warrant impeachment. That said, it’s more clear than ever that even as Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership swiftly move forward with impeachment hearings and testimony, they’ll wait as long as possible before committing to calling it impeachment.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Here’s the next guy to take the fall for Donald Trump, Bill Palmer, April 23, 2019. Say hello to Carl Kline, the guy who forced through the approvals of a whole bunch of illegitimate security clearances for Donald Trump’s underlings and family members, even after security officials and the U.S. intel community had ruled against such clearances.

House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings has subpoenaed Kline to testify about his role in the scandal, but according to CNN, Trump is now telling Kline to defy the subpoena – and Kline has rather stupidly decided to take Trump’s advice.

This means Kline is about to be held in contempt of Congress, which is not a good place for anyone to be in general. It’ll also put the spotlight on Kline’s actions with regard to whether he broke any laws while approving these illegitimate security clearances. Suddenly, this relative nobody is about to fully bear the brunt of Donald Trump’s abusive overreach.

U.S. Military, Militia Crime Claims

New York Times, Navy SEALs Were Warned Against Reporting Their Chief for War Crimes, Dave Philipps, April 23, 2019. A decorated Navy SEAL is due to go on trial in May, accused of war crimes in Iraq. His family and supporters say he was just doing his job. But a confidential Navy report paints a worse picture, finding a subculture that prized aggression and protected wrongdoers.

Stabbing a defenseless teenage captive to death. Picking off a school-age girl and an old man from a sniper’s roost. Indiscriminately spraying neighborhoods with rockets and machine-gun fire.

Navy SEAL commandos from Team 7’s Alpha Platoon said they had seen their highly decorated platoon chief commit shocking acts in Iraq. And they had spoken up, repeatedly. But their frustration grew as months passed and they saw no sign of official action.

Tired of being brushed off, seven members of the platoon called a private meeting with their troop commander in March 2018 at Naval Base Coronado near San Diego. According to a confidential Navy criminal investigation report obtained by The New York Times, they gave him the bloody details and asked for a formal investigation.

But instead of launching an investigation that day, the troop commander and his senior enlisted aide — both longtime comrades of the accused platoon leader, Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher — warned the seven platoon members that speaking out could cost them and others their careers, according to the report.

New York Times, Defiant New Mexico Militia Cites ‘God-Given Right to Be Here,’ Simon Romero, April 23, 2019. Members of a group that has been detaining migrants at the border are facing eviction from a town that would like to see them gone. Their commander is in jail. The authorities are giving them until Friday to clear out and leave. But the United Constitutional Patriots, the right-wing militia under scrutiny over detaining migrant families at the border with Mexico, is digging in.

“It’s my God-given right to be here,” said one balaclava-clad militia member who gave his name only as Viper. Chafing at the hostile reactions to the militia’s actions, he said that he was an Army veteran and that he expected his group, if pushed out, to set up camp in another location along the border.

“The guys in Washington say one thing about not wanting us on the ground but no one from the Border Patrol here has ever told me they don’t want our help,” he said, squinting under the midday sun. “We’re here to protect Americans from the illegals violating our sovereignty.”

Trump’s campaign showed a willingness to work with a foreign power — something his personal lawyer now insists is perfectly okay.

And Trump has furiously rejected congressional scrutiny of his presidency — taking the unprecedented step Monday of suing a Democratic committee chairman to block a subpoena for his financial records.

The events of the past week, following the release of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s dramatic 448-page report, are threatening to redefine the legal and ethical standards that have long served as constraints on the American presidency. And they suggest that few, if any, of the traditional guardrails that have kept Trump’s predecessors in check remain for this president and possibly those who will follow.

Unz Review, Opinion: The Conspiracy Against Trump, Philip M. Giraldi, right, April 23, 2019. The real “deplorable” in today’s United States is the continuation of a foreign policy based on endless aggression to maintain Washington’s military dominance in parts of the world where Americans have no conceivable interest. Many voters backed Donald J. Trump because he committed himself to changing all that, but, unfortunately, he has reneged on his promise, instead heightening tension with major powers Russia and China while also threatening Iran and Venezuela on an almost daily basis.

Now Cuba is in the crosshairs because it is allegedly assisting Venezuela. One might reasonably ask if America in its seemingly enduring role as the world’s most feared bully will ever cease and desist, but the more practical question might be “When will the psychopathic trio of John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Elliott Abrams be fired so the United States can begin to behave like a normal nation?”

Trump, to be sure, is the heart of the problem as he has consistently made bad, overly belligerent decisions when better and less abrasive options were available, something that should not necessarily always be blamed on his poor choice of advisers.

But one also should not discount the likelihood that the dysfunction in Trump is in part comprehensible, stemming from his belief that he has numerous powerful enemies who have been out do destroy him since before he was nominated as the GOP’s presidential candidate. This hatred of all things Trump has been manifested in the neoconservative “Nevertrump” forces led by Bill Kristol and by the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” prominent on the political left, regularly exhibited by Rachel Maddow.

Supreme Court Hears Census Case Today

Washington Post, New research shows just how badly a citizenship question would hurt the 2020 Census, Matt Barreto, Chris Warshaw, Matthew A. Baum, Bryce J. Dietrich, Rebecca Goldstein and Maya Sen, April 23, 2019 (print ed.). It could lead to a huge undercount, particularly of Latinos and immigrants. The Trump administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census reaches the Supreme Court on Tuesday. Thus far, three federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration, most recently in Maryland. The Supreme Court will consider not only whether the administration violated administrative law, but also whether its attempt violated the Constitution.

A crucial issue in the case is whether adding this question for the first time since 1950 will hurt the ability of the census to accurately count the American population. In particular, critics of the administration fear the question will dissuade some U.S. residents, especially immigrants, from answering the census.

The comedian Volodymyr Zelensky (right) won a landslide victory in Ukraine’s presidential election, according to official results with nearly all of the votes counted, making a comic actor with no experience in government or the military the commander in chief of a country that has been at war with Russian proxies for over five years.

With more than 95 percent of ballots cast on Sunday counted, Mr. Zelensky had won 73.17 percent of the vote, compared with just 24.5 percent for Petro O. Poroshenko, Ukraine’s incumbent president. Mr. Zelensky triumphed in every region, except for the area around the city of Lviv, a center of Ukrainian culture and nationalism in the west of the country.

Mr. Zelensky’s victory will give Ukraine its first Jewish leader and deliver a stinging rebuke to a political and business establishment represented by Mr. Poroshenko, a billionaire candy tycoon who campaigned on the nationalist slogan “Army, language, faith.”

After five years of grinding war with Russian proxies in the east of Ukraine, voters appeared to send a signal that they were more concerned with the internal menaces of corruption and poverty — ignoring Mr. Poroshenko’s warning, delivered after he cast his own ballot on Sunday, that voting for a comedian “is not funny” and could lead to “painful” consequences.

Mueller Probe Next Steps

Alliance for Justice, Congress, Bar Barr and Get to the Truth, Bill Yeomans, April 22, 2019. While members of the House majority stroke their chins over how to respond to the Mueller report, the false Trump/Barr no collusion/no obstruction narrative continues to dominate public perception. House leaders construe this uninformed public perception as reason to hesitate on impeachment. And the public, in turn, reads from the House’s hesitation that the report isn’t so bad. The longer the House waits before launching the inevitable impeachment probe, the more ground it will have to recover. The calendar demands speedy action. The House Judiciary Committee (HJC) should start by skipping testimony from Attorney General Barr and moving straight to Robert Mueller and his fact witnesses.

Barr is scheduled to testify before the HJC on May 2. The last thing the Committee should do is to waste precious time giving this mendacious man another platform to broadcast his false narrative about the Mueller report. While some majority members no doubt relish the prospect of catching Barr in his readily provable lies for all to see, with few exceptions Democrats on the Committee, handcuffed by the five-minute rule and the glare of TV lights, have been ineffective inquisitors.

Republican members, on the other hand, will not hesitate to use the hearing to buttress Barr and spout extended nonsense about the intelligence community abuses that triggered the special counsel investigation. They’ll offer Barr repeated opportunities to expand on his outrageous allegation that “spying” occurred; no matter that what they label spying was actually fully predicated surveillance authorized by federal judges on the FISA court, all of whose members are selected by that well-known anti-Republican partisan, Chief Justice John Roberts. This is a show the country does not need to repeat. And it is certainly not the way the committee majority wants to start educating the country about the real findings of the Mueller report.

Instead, cancel Barr and start with Mueller. Mueller’s testimony should do far more to enlighten the committee and undermine Barr’s false narrative than direct cross-examination of Barr. Barr’s lies are already on the record in his letter mis-summarizing the principal conclusions of the report and in the video of his misleading pre-release press conference.

The most basic questioning of Mueller will establish that the report did not address “collusion,” much less find its absence; that contrary to Barr’s statement, Mueller relied heavily on the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion prohibiting indictment of a sitting president in deciding not to label the president a criminal; that he did not intend for Barr to make the call on obstruction of justice; and that Mueller most assuredly – and explicitly -- did not clear Trump of obstruction of justice, instead laying out in detail ten obstructive episodes, at least eight of which any reasonable prosecutor would present to a grand jury for indictment absent the OLC memo. Mueller will also explain his rejection of Barr’s radical view that a president cannot obstruct justice so long as he is exercising a power granted to him by Article II of the Constitution.

Mueller can explain in detail the report’s findings regarding the Russian assault on the 2016 election, as well as the Trump campaign’s embrace of the Russian assistance; its unpatriotic failure to notify the FBI of the Russian intrusion; and the full extent of the campaign’s contacts with Russia. He can also walk through the episodes of obstruction and torpedo Barr’s suggestion that frustration excuses Trump’s conduct.

The Mueller hearing will be viewed extensively by the public. Most, of course, will not have read the 448-page report. Mueller’s testimony will be their introduction to the real narrative and the first debunking of the Trump/Barr cover narrative. Hear the corn popping, as people settle in for a high-drama civics lesson.

The committee should follow Mueller in rapid succession with testimony from as many of the principal fact witnesses behind the report as possible, starting with former White House counsel and self-described “real lawyer” Don McGahn, whose cooperation regarding obstruction is already winning him the Trump bully treatment. From there, the committee should run through the list of White House officials and Trump associates who contributed to the report.

Time’s a wastin.’ The Trump/Barr narrative is festering, infecting the public consciousness, and the 2020 election is only a year-and-a-half away. There will be delays and impediments. The report reveals that fourteen referrals from the Mueller investigation remain with U.S. Attorney offices and we know the identities of the defendants in only two of them. The committee will have to coordinate with those investigations to ensure that it does not step on them.

So it hardly raised an eyebrow when the president took to Twitter on Thursday to urge everyone to tune in to Fox for Attorney General William P. Barr’s (misleading) prelude to the release of the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. The results were predictable: Fox’s early news coverage was somewhat straight — kept so largely by the presence of Fox’s designated truth-teller, Chris Wallace.

The follow-up coverage and commentary, though, was outlandishly one-sided, led by Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was allowed to spin frenetically for what seemed like endless minutes, offering such gems as “there’s not a single surprise” in the report. “Nothing to see here” was the clear message — nothing but the corrupt investigation itself.

I tuned in to Fox for a while Thursday morning, trying the experiment of using it as my only news source for an hour or two. When I emerged and started reading and watching elsewhere — and looked at the report for myself — I felt like I had returned from beyond the looking glass and was back in the real world.

U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray are the defendants in a lawsuit filed on March 25 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging the four federal government respondents failed to adhere to a 2014 mandate implemented by Congress.

The mandate, according to the suit, required the FBI and an external review body it created to implement what “ultimately became known” as the 9/11 Review Commission to “assess any evidence known to the FBI that was not considered by the 9/11 Commission related to any factors that contributed in any manner to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,” according to the lawsuit.

“The defendants failed to comply with this mandate from Congress in several ways, as reflected in the FBI 9/11 Review Commission’s Report, completed and released March 25, 2015,” the 44-page original petition says.

The mandate in question was a result of the 9/11 Commission’s acknowledgement that “additional evidence relating to the attacks would likely be brought forward after their report was issued."

“Over the 10 years that followed, significant additional evidence regarding the 9/11 attacks was in fact publicly reported, in some cases as a result of ongoing federal government inquiries, and in some cases as a result of ongoing inquiries by concerned citizens and nonprofit organizations,” the suit says.

Court documents explain that the 9/11 Review Commission noted in its report on page 100 that the FBI’s New York and San Diego field offices “have continued to investigate 9/11."

“The FBI’s 9/11 Review Commission in its Report at page 100 significantly notes that ‘The Review Commission found that the FBI, to its credit, still has the 9/11 attacks and any potential conspiracy surrounding them, under active investigation,’” the suit says.

The complaint additionally argues that “the FBI’s 9/11 Review Commission, and the FBI itself, failed to assess and report to Congress, as mandated, several other categories of significant 9/11-related evidence known to the FBI via reports in the press, via the web, and via public events and/or reflected in the FBI’s own records.”

The Lawyers’ Committee, a Pennsylvania nonprofit organization, says in the suit that it “believes that the family members of the victims of the tragic crimes of 9/11 have a compelling right to know the full truth of what happened to their loved ones on 9/11, and that Congress and the Department of Justice, in order to do their jobs, have a compelling need to know.”

AE echoes the Lawyers’ Committee’s sentiments by stating that the “investigation and education of the public as to the true reasons these [World Trade Center] buildings collapsed on 9/11 [is] an important organizational interest distinct from the general public interest in seeing government agencies comply with the law.”

The nonprofits are joined in the litigation by Robert McIlvaine. McIlvaine’s son, Bobby, was killed in the attacks on New York.

Mark G. Harrison, of Bloomington, Ind., and John M. Clifford with the law firm Clifford & Garde, LLP, of Washington, D.C., are representing the complainants.

U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Case No. 1-19-CV-0824

April 21

Massive Death In Sri Lankan Easter Bombings

New York Times, More Than 200 Dead in Coordinated Bombings in Sri Lanka, Staff report, April 21, 2019. Live Updates: Deadly Carnage at Churches and Hotels on Easter Sunday. At least eight bombing attacks struck at least three churches, along with three five-star hotels favored by foreigners, killing more than 200 people. Seven suspects were arrested in connection with the explosions, which were carried out by suicide bombers, an official said.

As Christians in Sri Lanka (shown with a green dot at center on a world map at right) gathered on Sunday morning to celebrate Easter Mass, the culmination of Holy Week, powerful explosions ripped through three churches packed with worshipers, leaving hundreds of victims amid a havoc of splintered and blood-spattered pews.

In what the police said were coordinated attacks carried out by a single group, bombers also struck three five-star hotels popular with tourists. At least 207 people were killed and 450 others injured, a police spokesman, Ruwan Gunasekera, said.

News of the bombings, the largest targeted attack on South Asian Christians in recent memory, rippled out all Easter morning, interrupting celebrations across the world. Pope Francis, after celebrating Mass in St. Peter’s Square, said the attacks had “brought mourning and sorrow” on the most important of Christian holidays.

Sri Lanka emerged a decade ago from a bloody, 26-year civil war, during which Tamil guerrillas pioneered large-scale use of suicide bombing. Effective use of suicide bombers in Sri Lanka was then widely studied and copied in the Middle East.

“It has been 10 years since we last saw this kind of horror,” said Hemasiri Fernando, the country’s defense secretary.

New York Times, Sri Lanka’s Long History of Violence, Mujib Mashal, April 21, 2019. The small island nation is famous for its beauty, but also for a brutal three-decade civil war and sectarian tensions that still simmer. After a bloody civil war that dragged on for nearly three decades, Sri Lanka had been enjoying a decade of relative calm. That was shattered on Sunday when a coordinated bombing attack killed more than 200 people.

Here is some context to help you understand the latest events in the small island nation, known for a tremendous natural beauty that attracted more than two million tourists in 2018: The country gained independence from British rule in 1948 as the dominion of Ceylon, and became the Republic of Sri Lanka in 1972.

But much of its history has been marred by sectarian violence. And more recently, it has been caught up in much larger regional rivalries between China and India. About 22 million people live in Sri Lanka, more than 70 percent of them Buddhists. Smaller ethnic and religious groups include Hindus, at over 12 percent, Muslims at under 10 percent, and Catholics at about 6 percent. At least three churches were targeted by Sunday’s bombings.

Despite their clear majority, Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists have been stoking fears that the minority groups, particularly the Muslims, are increasing in numbers and influence. The nationalist fervor has led to violent clashes.

Comedian Wins Ukraine Presidency

Washington Post, Comedian is elected president of Ukraine, exit poll shows, Anton Troianovski, April 21, 2019.Comedian Volodymyr Zelensky (shown above in a file photo) swept to victory in Ukraine’s presidential election Sunday, an exit poll showed, as millions of voters weary of war and economic hardship rebuked the ruling elites and ushered in fresh uncertainty for their geopolitically pivotal nation.

Zelensky, a 41-year-old TV star with no political experience, won 73 percent of the vote in the runoff election, according to national exit poll results broadcast by Ukrainian television. President Petro Poroshenko, who was running for his second five-year term, accepted defeat in a speech soon after the polls closed.

Zelensky walked onstage at his election-night celebration to the theme song from “Servant of the People”— the popular sitcom in which he plays the president of Ukraine.

Comedian and presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky, center right, and wife Olena Zelenska leave a polling station after voting in the second round of presidential elections in Kiev on Sunday. (Sergei Grits/AP)

Amid a continuing war in eastern Ukraine, economic travails and popular revulsion over allegations of government corruption, Zelensky’s anti-establishment, antiwar and reformist message captured the support of a wide cross-section of the country.

For nearly two years, the public, Congress and the White House waited to learn if special counsel Robert S. Mueller III would find that President Trump had committed crimes. When the answer was finally revealed, it turned out Mueller didn’t think that was his job at all.

The special counsel ended his investigation last month, pointedly choosing not to reach a conclusion about whether the president had obstructed justice.

In a report of its findings, Mueller’s team said that choice was driven in large part by a long-standing legal opinion at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that a sitting president should not be indicted, even if the charges remained sealed.

Mueller's team concluded that also meant they could not accuse the president of a crime, even in secret internal documents, the report said.

That move surprised everyone, including Attorney General William P. Barr (right) and his senior advisers, according to current and former Justice Department officials. When Mueller presented his findings without reaching a decision about the president, Barr reviewed the evidence and decided that Trump had not obstructed justice.

The unusual ending to the investigation stems from a key legal disagreement between Mueller’s team and Barr — opening the door to further political fights over presidential power, Justice Department policies and decision-making inside the Trump administration.

Jonathan Turley, left, a law professor at George Washington University, said Mueller’s failure to make a decision on obstruction was “one of the biggest surprises of the report,” and he was still struggling to understand the special counsel’s thought process.

“It doesn’t make any sense, because on collusion, he seemed to be perfectly empowered to reach a conclusion on whether the president committed a crime,” Turley said. “The other problem is that his mandate clearly allowed him to make a decision, and [Justice Department headquarters] had clearly indicated he could make a decision.”

Mueller Follow up

New York Times, How 2020 Democrats Are Gaming Out Trump Impeachment Quandary, Matt Flegenheimer and Jonathan Martin, April 21, 2019. Most of the Democratic presidential candidates have responded to the special counsel’s report with tentative remarks about impeaching President Trump. But many feel no pressure to demand it because they do not hear a clamoring for it on the campaign trail.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, right, who has worked for months to find traction in a crowded Democratic presidential primary, stepped forward on Friday with a call to arms: President Trump must be impeached.

What followed, generally, was conspicuous silence — and not just from her colleagues in Congress.

After sidestepping the explosive issue of impeachment for months by citing the inquiry by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, most of the other 17 Democratic presidential candidates have responded to the special counsel’s report with tentative remarks about impeaching Mr. Trump, demands for the unredacted Mueller findings, calls for further hearings or attempts to simply change the subject.

Anything, that is, to avoid clearly answering the question of whether lawmakers should remove the president from office.

Underpinning the candidates’ calculations are complex sets of short- and long-term incentives. Democratic hopefuls could receive a fund-raising boost by embracing impeachment and energizing liberal donors. But some strategists and lawmakers say that a failed effort would only strengthen Mr. Trump’s re-election chances, allowing him to claim further vindication.

New York Times, How Cohen Turned Against Trump, Ben Protess, William K. Rashbaum and Maggie Haberman, April 21, 2019. Michael Cohen, President Trump’s fixer (shown above during an ABC News interview last year), had for months sought “a little loving and respect” and feared his longtime boss had forsaken him. Confidential emails and texts chronicle the undoing of their relationship.

Michael D. Cohen was at a breaking point. He told friends he was suicidal. He insisted to lawyers he would never go to jail. Most of all, he feared that President Trump, his longtime boss, had forsaken him.

“Basically he needs a little loving and respect booster,” one of Mr. Cohen’s legal advisers at the time, Robert J. Costello, wrote in a text message to Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s lead lawyer. “He is not thinking clearly because he feels abandoned.”

That was last June. The “booster” from Mr. Trump never arrived. And by August, Mr. Cohen’s relationship with him had gone from fraught to hostile, casting a shadow on the Trump presidency and helping drive multiple criminal investigations into the president’s inner circle, including some that continued after the special counsel’s work ended.

1) Mr. Cohen implicated the president in a crime. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan effectively characterized Mr. Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator in the hush money payments, which violated campaign finance laws because they were made to influence the outcome of the election.

2) He assisted criminal investigations into Mr. Trump’s business Mr. Cohen did not enter into a formal cooperation agreement with the Southern District prosecutors, but voluntarily met with them about his knowledge of Mr. Trump’s family, business and inner circle.

Washington Post, Opinion: Barr tried to exonerate Trump. That’s not how the special counsel rules work, Neal Katyal (right) and Joshua A. Geltzer, April 21, 2019. The attorney general isn’t supposed to be rebutting the special counsel. The redacted version of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report made one thing quite clear: Attorney General William Barr has gone out of his way to try to exonerate the president. But Barr’s comments about obstruction of justice have been deeply flawed — and at odds with the spirit of the regulations governing this type of politically sensitive investigation by a special counsel. (One of us, Neal Katyal, drafted those regulations in the late ’90s.)

Mueller noted in the report that his office decided not to make a “traditional prosecutorial judgment” on whether Trump had obstructed justice, because the Justice Department has a policy not to indict a sitting president. But Barr has misleadingly implied that the longstanding policy wasn’t any part of the reason for that decision. That is not the case. Mueller says right at the outset of the report’s second volume, where Barr wouldn’t have missed it, that he felt bound by that policy: “We determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes.”

So Trump’s claim, based on Barr’s spin, that the Mueller report exonerates him is flatly untrue. Mueller said, in effect, Because I’m investigating a sitting president, I cannot indict him, and therefore I won’t call him a criminal even if he’s guilty as sin. He also explicitly wrote that if “the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state . . . However, we are unable to reach that judgment.” Mueller couldn’t indict the president, but he could have cleared him. He didn’t.

Barr shouldn’t be offering a rebuttal. He should be offering the report to Congress — and then leaving it to lawmakers to determine what comes next.

OpEdNews, Opinion: Trump's Attempt to Weaponize NSA Against His Enemies, Wayne Madsen, April 21, 2019. A few weeks after Donald Trump's inauguration he blasted the US National Security Agency (NSA), falsely claiming the signals intelligence agency leaked classified information to the media. In February 2017, Trump tweeted: "Information is being illegally given to the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost by the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?)... Just like Russia." It was Trump's second public attack on NSA. During the 2016 presidential election campaign, Trump accused NSA of withholding intercepted copies of his opponent Hillary Clinton's emails." Trump ranted, "Obviously they [NSA] don't want to get them... they're protecting her, they're coddling her."

Trump displayed for the world to see his ignorance about the role and mission of the NSA. Even after the agency's intra-Five Eyes signals intelligence alliance warts were publicly exposed by the Edward Snowden leaks, Trump was making wild accusations about NSA that have only been the fodder for Hollywood movies like "Enemy Of The State." "Mercury Rising," "Sneakers," and "Good Will Hunting."

The recently-released heavily-redacted report by Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller on foreign involvement in the 2016 presidential election contains a startling revelation: not since the Nixon administration has a US president flagrantly attempted to use the NSA to involve itself in a domestic law enforcement matter in pursuit of an Oval Office cover-up. According to Volume II of the "Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, President Trump attempted to involve the NSA in the FBI's then-ongoing investigation into Trump's campaign and his possible illegal activities as president.

Trump's actions to misuse a US intelligence agency to protect him from criminal liability is an impeachable offense. The precedence was decided by the US House of Representatives in Article II of its impeachment resolution against Richard Nixon, right. The House found that, in the case of Nixon, he abused his office by misusing federal agencies in violation of their regulations. The article states that Nixon "repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposes of these agencies."

U.S. High-TechEducation Dispute

New York Times, Silicon Valley Came to Kansas Schools. That Started a Rebellion, Nellie Bowles, April 21, 2019. Public schools in Kansas rolled out a web-based learning platform backed by Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook. Now students have staged walkouts and sit-ins, and their parents have organized.

“I want to just take my Chromebook back and tell them I’m not doing it anymore,” said Kallee Forslund, 16, a 10th grader in Wellington.

Eight months earlier, public schools near Wichita had rolled out a web-based platform and curriculum from Summit Learning. The Silicon Valley-based program promotes an educational approach called “personalized learning,” which uses online tools to customize education. The platform that Summit provides was developed by Facebook engineers. It is funded by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive (shown at a G-8 Global Summit), and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician.

Many families in the Kansas towns, which have grappled with underfunded public schools and deteriorating test scores, initially embraced the change. Under Summit’s program, students spend much of the day on their laptops and go online for lesson plans and quizzes, which they complete at their own pace. Teachers assist students with the work, hold mentoring sessions and lead special projects. The system is free to schools. The laptops are typically bought separately.

Then, students started coming home with headaches and hand cramps. Some said they felt more anxious. One child began having a recurrence of seizures. Another asked to bring her dad’s hunting earmuffs to class to block out classmates because work was now done largely alone.

“We’re allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies,” said Tyson Koenig, a factory supervisor in McPherson, who visited his son’s fourth-grade class. In October, he pulled the 10-year-old out of the school.

In a school district survey of McPherson middle school parents released this month, 77 percent of respondents said they preferred their child not be in a classroom that uses Summit. More than 80 percent said their children had expressed concerns about the platform.

The Supreme Court this week takes up the most consequential Trump administration initiative since last term’s travel ban, with the justices considering whether a question about citizenship can be added to the 2020 Census.

The restrictions on travelers from certain majority-Muslim countries was approved last June by a five-member conservative majority deferential to President Trump’s power to decide who enters the country. And the administration has been anxious to move to the high court the legal battle over another issue that reflects its hard-line immigration policies.

A coalition of Democratic-led states, cities and civil rights organizations oppose the effort, saying the question is a political move that will intimidate households with ties to noncitizens and result in an undercount that will harm the nonpartisan goal of getting an accurate tally of everyone in the country.

The Americas: Corruption, Death

Washington Post, Ex-president’s suicide brings more criticism of Peru’s pretrial detentions, Simeon Tegel, April 21, 2019 (print ed). It’s impossible to know why Alan García killed himself this week. The charismatic politician, once hailed as Latin America’s JFK, shot himself Wednesday after police showed up at his home in Lima to arrest him in the largest corruption scandal in the region’s history.

Had he not killed himself, García, 69 (shown at right in a 2008 photo via Wikipedia), would have faced up to three years in pretrial detention, potentially without actually being indicted — a term unthinkable in many democracies, even for suspects facing overwhelming evidence of the most heinous crimes.

“It is increasingly difficult to justify,” said Ignazio de Ferrari, a political scientist at Lima’s University of the Pacific.

But it’s the fate confronting more of Peru’s most prominent politicians as they’re swept up in the sprawling Odebrecht investigation by a new generation of aggressive prosecutors determined to stamp out the systemic graft that has long slowed economic development and corroded faith in public institutions here.

Other suspects who have been ordered to pretrial detention in the scandal include former presidents Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who is 80, and Ollanta Humala, who has three young children. Humala’s wife, the children’s mother, was also jailed.

Critics question the courts’ acceptance of the often limited arguments presented by prosecutors for locking up high-profile suspects before they have been indicted. They warn that the tactic could threaten the legitimacy of Peru’s landmark investigation.

Arguably no country outside Brazil has been affected as badly as Peru. Four of the country’s previous presidents, including García, have been implicated. The freeze on Odebrecht’s extensive operations here, meanwhile, is thought to have slashed GDP growth by as much as 1.5 percent.

The case has crystallized Peruvians’ fury at entrenched graft, leaving many unconcerned about observing the niceties of due process for those suspected of benefiting from the company’s criminal largesse.

De Ferrari didn’t wish to defend García, but he called the use of pretrial detention “excessive.” Diego García Sayán, a former justice minister and judge on the inter-American Court of Human Rights, wants to see prosecutors adopt a “more selective criterion” for requesting detention. García Sayán warns that the practice provides rhetorical ammunition to those who want to block the anticorruption offensive. An example came this week when Mauricio Mulder, a lawmaker from García’s APRA party, described the probe into the former president as a “fascist persecution.”

For decades, Democrats and Republicans have hailed America’s business elite, especially in Silicon Valley, as the country’s salvation. The government might be gridlocked, the electorate angry and divided, but America’s innovators seemed to promise a relatively pain-free way out of the mess. Their companies produced an endless series of products that kept the U.S. economy churning and its gross domestic product climbing. Their philanthropic efforts were aimed at fixing some of the country’s most vexing problems. Government’s role was to stay out of the way.

Now that consensus is shattering. For the first time in decades, capitalism’s future is a subject of debate among presidential hopefuls and a source of growing angst for America’s business elite. In places such as Silicon Valley, the slopes of Davos, Switzerland, and the halls of Harvard Business School, there is a sense that the kind of capitalism that once made America an economic envy is responsible for the growing inequality and anger that is tearing the country apart.

April 20

C-SPAN Founder Retires

Wall Street Journal, After 40 Years, C-Span’s Founder Signs Off, Kyle Peterson, April 20, 2019 (print ed., subscription required). Brian Lamb (shown at right), the man who put Congress on live television as , reflects on the results and explains why the Supreme Court ought to be next. (Lamb, 77, is the founder, executive chairman, and now retired CEO of C-SPAN; an American cable network which provides coverage of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate as well as other public affairs events).

"Lying is the word that I was use to describe this town," says Brian Lamb, in his usual Midwestern deadpan. "I don't know if it will ever stop. It's gotten worse rather than getting better, and both sides do it. You've got to listen very carefully to what they're saying."

Mueller Fallout: What's Next?

Washington Post, Trump seethes after Mueller report relies on notes from White House aides, Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey and Robert Costa, April 20, 2019 (print ed.). Much of President Trump’s ire was directed at former White House counsel Donald McGahn, whose ubiquity in the footnotes of the special counsel’s report laid bare his cooperation in chronicling Trump's actions.

Let's start with one conclusion. The Senate will not impeach Trump with Mitch McConnell in charge. But that was the same assumption made about Richard Nixon, that there were not enough votes in the senate to impeach him. Nonetheless, Democrats had the guts and integrity to proceed to investigate the serious allegations that came out of Watergate. Eventually, the truths that emerged were enough to force Nixon to resign. And it wasn't the Democrats who forced him. The Republicans did. And it was the Republicans who pardoned the despicable criminal.

Let me say it again, to be crystal clear. the narrative of Nixon and Watergate was very similar, early on, to where we stand today. People did not believe that the Senate would follow through to find a verdict of guilty if the house started the process of impeachment. Nonetheless, the Democrats proceeded to investigate Nixon until the findings revealed such a miasma of criminality and corruption that the Republicans could not evade the argument against Nixon. They took the right step of telling Nixon to leave but then took the wrong, immoral step of pardoning him. That set the country careening in an immoral, amoral direction for almost fifty years.

Now, the Democrats are faced with a president who is guilty of far more, with many of his appointees and those who have worked for him already guilty and sentenced for crimes, and over a dozen more secret cases under way. It comes down to two things for the Democrats, integrity and the courage to do do the right thing.

The right thing is to aggressively continue where the Mueller investigation left off. I don't believe it matters whether they call it an impeachment hearing or a corruption hearing. They have an oath-bound obligation to pursue the truth and the facts. To start with they have an obligation to get the complete, un-filtered, un-redacted Mueller report, including all supporting documents. If Barr refuses to deliver it they must do everything within their means to get it, including arresting and imprisoning Barr. They must work with state judiciary agencies. They must do everything they can to get Trump's tax records, to ascertain whether he is guilty of violating the Emoluments clause.

If they do not go into this full-throttle, they will be guilty of failing to uphold their oaths of office. They will be guilty of cowardice. The centrist, fake progressive leaders of the house majority, Pelosi and Hoyer will embrace the Obama-Clinton Democrat mantle of can't-do-ism and do-nothing-ism, the "look forward not backward" approach that allowed the impeachable crimes of the previous Bush-Cheney administration that House Judiciary Chair John Conyers enumerated in great detail.

Michelle Goldberg (right) writes, in her NYTImes article, Mueller Did His Job. Now It's the Democrats' Turn, which I must confess is what spurred me to write this article,

"It's a national disgrace that Trump sleeps in the White House instead of a federal prison cell, but it has been a while since I had any expectation that the special counsel Robert Mueller's findings, many of which were finally released to the public on Thursday, could set things right."

Then Goldberg talks about Mueller, a decent man of integrity, the closest thing to Walter Cronkite we have in these times fake news and distrust. She describes how the Repubicans are tolerating all this corruption and ignoring the profoundly serious allegations and findings of the Mueller report. Then she concludes,

"Democrats, conversely, have facts on their side, but not conviction. They are reluctant to begin an impeachment inquiry into Trump because majorities, in polls, don't support it, and there is no Republican buy-in. Whether or not this is politically wise, failing to impeach would be a grave abdication. If you want people to believe that the misdeeds enumerated in the Mueller report are serious, you have to act like it.

To not even try to impeach Trump is to collaborate in the Trumpian fiction that he has done nothing impeachable. And if Congress won't take the lead in condemning the president's lawlessness and demanding justice, one of the Democrats running for the presidential nomination should. Mueller has given us the truth of what Trump has done, and in that sense the hokey faith the Resistance put in him was not misplaced. But right now only a political fight can make that truth matter."

And it gets worse. Another NY Times Op-Ed proposes that there is a "national security nightmare... that is the missing piece of the Mueller report." The article explains that Mueller inherited a counterintelligence operation:

"President Trump may claim "exoneration" on a narrowly defined criminal coordination charge. But a counterintelligence investigation can yield something even more important: an intelligence assessment of how likely it is that someone in this case, the president is acting, wittingly or unwittingly, under the influence of or in collaboration with a foreign power. Was Donald Trump a knowing or unknowing Russian asset, used in some capacity to undermine our democracy and national security?"

The Democrat party must take action, even if it means an uprising that takes over the leadership of the party, taking it away from morally compromised Nancy Pelosi and Stenny Hoyer, who have a decades-long history keeping impeachment... and justice "off the table." I cringe when I see new photos of Pelosi and see a failed leader, a bully who refuses to find the courage and integrity to get the oath-required job done.

David Swanson, who worked closely with former judiciary chair Conyers on George W. Bush impeachment efforts, provides, in his article, The 20 Surest Paths to Impeachment, a roadmap that should be followed.

The cowards and facile politicians may choose to take the easier route of poll-driven avoidance of impeachment. And I'm not saying that the House leadership should use the term impeachment at all. But they must aggressively begin investigating every one of the issues that Mueller's investigation and the counterintelligence investigation have raised, as well as the legitimate issues that Swanson presents.

The word here in Washington during the past week, of course, has been the Mueller Report. We might even call it the "Mueller Dossier" because it has some pretty shocking stuff in it.

The Mueller Report -- and we now have part of it -- has now gone through bowdlerization and expurgation at the hands of [William] Barr. Barr, of course, a shameless Republican operative, a shill, a hatchet man, a person of no moral fiber, somebody of no status really.

We had heard all these talking heads on cable television preeting and babbling about how Barr was highly respected. This was part of the collective swoon of the cable television world at the occasion of the death of George H. W. Bush. So, we never wanted to be part of that [as co-author of George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, published in 1992]. And that left them incapable of seeing that what was being given to them in the person of Barr was a vital organ of the CIA-Bush faction. That Barr was the guy who protected George H. W. Bush from indictment, impeachment possibly, but more likely indictment back in 1992 -- those telltale infamous pardons of December 24th of 1992.

So, this was the big, the big issue this week.

We want to go into that. You're going to hear an analysis overview, not all the details. Can't even think of that in a program of this length, but not even needed. A lot of these details are known.

We're going to be focused on flaws of Mueller, imsufficiencies of shortcomings of Mueller, failures of nerve by Mueller. There's no way around it. We say that with sadness. We had hoped for great things.

But we did get good things. What are they?

The historical merit of Mueller is that he kept Trump pinned down, immobilized for two precious years -- and that is a gift of infintite value. Trump wanted to go on a rampage. I think Trump wanted to divide the world with Putin and Xi, a new Yalta, a new worldwide Yalta, piloted by Russia and China on the ruins of the United States. That was the general idea. There's even quotations in the report. But it's hard to find these things, because there's no 'Word Search,' at least in the version that I have.

What he was going to get was an attempt to carve the world: A new version perhaps of the Hitler-Stalin Pact -- how about that? -- a Hitler-Stalin Pact but with this time with the Oriental despotism of Xi and his faction of neo-Maoists.

This is not the time for the United States to engage in that. The old Yalta of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was largely an exercise in recognizing strategic realities.

So, thank you to Mueller for keeping Trump pinned down. He wanted to sell out the United States in terms of dealing with the Russians. And, instead, Trump couldn't do it. This is my word to the ultra-lefts.

Now there are critiques of Mueller, which in some ways I share. He obviously succumbed. He did not fight back and defeat the absurd and obsolete doctrine tailored to 1973 Nixon-Agnew era by which the president cannot be indicted but the vice president can be. That is the Dixon opinion. This is the regulation binding the Justice Department. But it's not a law. It's not a statutory provision. It's not a Supreme Court opinion. It's just a regulation, which could be changed at any time by any attorney general. It must go. It is absurd. It is obsolete.

Maria Butina and her friend Paul Erickson, a Republican activist and operative

U.S. prosecutors requested an 18-month prison sentence for Russian gun rights activist Maria Butina for conspiring with a senior Russian official to infiltrate the National Rifle Association and conservative U.S. political circles for the Kremlin from 2015 until her arrest in July.

Butina, 30, the first Russian national convicted of seeking to influence American policy in the run-up to the 2016 election as an undeclared agent of a foreign government, cooperated after pleading guilty in December, and prosecutors said their recommendation made Friday night had already accounted for a six-month reduction for cooperation under a plea deal.

While Butina was not a traditional spy or trained intelligence officer, her actions bore “all the hallmarks” of an intelligence operation to target powerful individuals in a future presidential administration for recruitment later, prosecutors wrote.

U.S. Clean Water

Washington Post, A crisis in Kentucky shows the high cost of clean drinking water, Frances Stead Sellers, Photos by Bonnie Jo Mount, April 20, 2019 (featured web ed.). As Martin County tries to fix its deteriorating system, old pipes across the country continue breaking down. The challenges are huge: Experts estimate that it will take $1 trillion to support demand for drinking water over the next 25 years.

Lovely, Kentucky. — When the well water here turned brown and started tasting salty, Heather Blevins’s parents hooked their property on Dead Man’s Curve into the municipal supply. It seemed like a blessing until new hazards emerged: Today, Blevins says, the tap water smells of bleach, occasionally takes on a urine-colored tinge, and leaves her 7- and 8-year-old children itching every time they take a bath.

The challenges are monumental here in Appalachia and beyond: The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s drinking-water system a D grade in its quadrennial report card. The network of more than 1 million miles of pipes includes many that are a century old and have a 75-year life expectancy. Across the country, 14 percent of treated water is lost through leaks, and here in Martin County, that figure has at times reached more than 70 percent. The American Water Works Association estimates that it will take $1 trillion to support demand over the next 25 years; in Martin County, repairs carry a price tag exceeding $10 million.

U.S. Politics

New York Times, Should a White Man Be the Face of the Democratic Party? Astead W. Herndon and Matt Flegenheimer, April 20, 2019. Interviews with several dozen Democrats show how the party is grappling with questions about race and gender in the Trump era. The strong diversity in the Democratic field has become somewhat overshadowed by white male candidates.

As former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. prepares to enter the 2020 race this coming week, Democrats have seen the strong diversity in their field — with candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris reflecting the multiracial and largely female base of the party — become somewhat overshadowed by white male candidates. Bernie Sanders has a wide fund-raising lead, he and Mr. Biden lead in polls, and Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg have enjoyed outsize attention from voters in early primary states, extensive media coverage and viral success with online donors.

Prediction In Ukraine Vote Sunday

Washington Post, Comedian expected to be next Ukrainian president, Anton Troianovski, April 20, 2019 (print ed.). Zoya Troshina said she plans to vote for a comedian for president Sunday because she wants peace in her country. “At any price,” the 69-year-old retired engineer added. The comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky, 41 (shown above in a screenshot), is the front-runner against incumbent Petro Poroshenko in Sunday’s runoff, putting Ukraine on the cusp of becoming the latest nation to cast its future with an untested outsider.

Driving Zelensky’s surge is voter disdain for Poroshenko, president since 2014 (and shown in a 2010 file photo), and widespread fatigue with the war against Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Zelensky offers few policy specifics but the promise of a fresh start and the fantasy of the perfectly incorruptible leader whom he plays on TV.

Polls have predicted a landslide for Zelensky, a star whose popular sitcom, “Servant of the People,” features Zelensky as a schoolteacher turned righteous president of Ukraine. His entertainment-driven campaign reached its apex Friday as he debated Poroshenko in a 70,000-seat stadium in Kiev — a spectacle proposed by Zelensky.

“Why hasn’t the war ended yet?” Zelensky shot across the stadium stage to Poroshenko. “That’s the kind of commander in chief you are.”

A survey published this week by Rating, a Ukrainian polling firm, showed Zelensky leading Poroshenko 58 percent to 22 percent among those planning to cast a ballot, with 20 percent undecided.

Other polls have shown Zelensky with a similar margin, while Poroshenko’s standing has been dragged down by the war, corruption scandals and the economy.

Reporter Killed In Northern Ireland

Washington Post, ‘Derry tonight. Absolute madness:’ Journalist killed in Northern Ireland clash, Amanda Ferguson and William Booth, April 20, 2019 (print ed.). Police opened a murder investigation into a shooting they called “a terrorist act.” A bright young journalist whose work focused on the legacy of violence in the Northern Ireland conflict, known as “the Troubles,” was killed Thursday night during riots in the border city of Londonderry.

Police had been carrying out raids against suspected militant Irish nationalists, and shots fired during the ensuing clashes struck the writer Lyra McKee, 29, of Belfast, authorities said.

It was a night of random gunfire and petrol bombs — like the nights from the old days, an echo to the years when Ireland was tearing itself apart. But this is 2019, and it was broadcast on social media.

McKee’s last tweet on Thursday night showed a photograph of the rioting, with white police vans and black smoke rising in the distance. “Derry tonight,” she wrote. “Absolute madness.”

New York Times, Mueller Details Multiple Contacts With Russians and Trump’s Efforts to Thwart Inquiry, Mark Mazzetti, April 19, 2019 (print ed.). Cites Legal Constraints in Declining to Charge, but Does Not Exonerate. Robert S. Mueller III revealed a frantic, monthslong effort by President Trump to thwart the investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference, cataloging in a report released on Thursday the attempts by Mr. Trump to escape an inquiry that imperiled his presidency from the start.

The much-anticipated report laid out how a team of prosecutors working for Mr. Mueller, the special counsel, wrestled with whether the president’s actions added up to an indictable offense of obstruction of justice for a sitting president. They ultimately decided not to charge Mr. Trump, citing numerous legal and factual constraints, but pointedly declined to exonerate him.

“If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state,” Mr. Mueller’s investigators wrote. “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.”

Mr. Mueller inherited a sweeping inquiry 23 months ago into whether Mr. Trump or any of his aides had coordinated with the Russian government’s campaign to sabotage the presidential election. The report found numerous contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Russians in the months before and after the election — meetings in pursuit of business deals, policy initiatives and political dirt about Hillary Clinton — but said there was “insufficient evidence” to establish that there had been a criminal conspiracy.

The special counsel rejected arguments advanced by the president’s lawyers that he is shielded from obstruction of justice laws by his unique constitutional role and powers. Follow along for the latest findings as a team of Post reporters dissects Robert S. Mueller III’s report.

President Trump, upon first learning of the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, cursed and declared, “this is the end of my presidency,” according to the redacted 400-page report by Mueller released Thursday by the Justice Department.

The detailed document depicts a Trump campaign that expected to “benefit electorally” from information stolen and released by Russia and a president who subsequently engaged in several alarming actions, including seeking the ouster of former officials and ordering a memo that would clear his name.

The release of the report followed a news conference at which Attorney General William P. Barr exonerated Trump, saying neither he nor his campaign colluded with Russia and that none of Trump’s actions rose to the level of obstruction of justice, despite Mueller leaving that question unanswered in his report.

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Commentary: Impeachable -- Trump's attempted domestic re-weaponization of NSA, Wayne Madsen, left, April 19, 2019 (subscription required; excerpted with permission). Not since the Nixon administration has a U.S. president flagrantly attempted to use the National Security Agency (NSA) to involve itself in a domestic law enforcement matter in pursuit of an Oval Office cover-up....

Trump’s action to misuse a U.S. intelligence agency to protect him from criminal liability is an impeachable offense, as previously decided by the U.S. House of Representatives in Article II of its impeachment resolution against Nixon.

New York Times, House Democrats Subpoena Full Report, and All Evidence, Nicholas Fandos, April 19, 2019. The subpoena escalates a fight with the attorney general over what material Congress is entitled to see from the investigation. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee formally issued a subpoena on Friday demanding that the Justice Department hand over to Congress an unredacted version of Robert S. Mueller III’s report and all of the evidence underlying it by May 1.

The subpoena, one of the few issued thus far by House Democrats, escalates a fight with Attorney General William P. Barr over what material Congress is entitled to see from the special counsel’s nearly two-year investigation. The chairman, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York (right), asked for all evidence, including summaries of witness interviews and classified intelligence.

“My committee needs and is entitled to the full version of the report and the underlying evidence consistent with past practice,” Mr. Nadler said in a statement. “Even the redacted version of the report outlines serious instances of wrongdoing by President Trump and some of his closest associates. It now falls to Congress to determine the full scope of that alleged misconduct and to decide what steps we must take going forward.”

New York Times, A Portrait of the White House and Its Culture of Dishonesty, Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, April 18, 2019. The report by Robert S. Mueller III shows a hotbed of conflict defined by a president who lies and tries to get his staff to lie for him. At one juncture after another, President Trump gave in to anger in ways that turned aides into witnesses against him.

As President Trump met with advisers in the Oval Office in May 2017 to discuss replacements for the F.B.I. director he had just fired, Attorney General Jeff Sessions slipped out of the room to take a call.

When he came back, he gave Mr. Trump bad news: Robert S. Mueller III had just been appointed as a special counsel to take over the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and any actions by the president to impede it.

Mr. Trump slumped in his chair. “Oh, my God,” he said. “This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”

It has not been the end of his presidency, but it has come to consume it. Although the resulting two-year investigation ended without charges against Mr. Trump, Mr. Mueller’s report painted a damning portrait of a White House dominated by a president desperate to thwart the inquiry only to be restrained by aides equally desperate to thwart his orders.

Politico, Judge firm on July trial for Flynn partner Kian, Josh Gerstein, April 19, 2019. A federal judge said Friday he's committed to launching a trial in July for one of the cases springing from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation: the prosecution of Bijan Kian, a business partner of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn (right). "We're going to keep our July 15 trial date," U.S. District Court Judge Anthony Trenga said emphatically during a brief hearing Friday morning in Alexandria, Virginia. Trenga made the comment after defense lawyers for Kian complained that the process of turning over investigative records to the defense has stalled for more than a month.

Kian, who also goes by name Rafiekian, was indicted in December on two federal felony charges stemming from work he allegedly did with Flynn as an unregistered foreign agent for Turkey. The indictment says the scheme, which played out as Flynn was a top adviser to the Trump presidential campaign, involved lobbying on behalf of Turkish officials seeking to gain custody of a dissident cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who has been in exile in the U.S. for decades.

Flynn was not charged in the case, but admitted to part of the scheme publicly in 2017 when he pleaded guilty to a false-statement charge brought by Mueller's office. As part of the plea deal, he agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. Flynn's sentencing in the other case has been postponed to allow him to testify at Kian's trial, where he is expected to be the government's star witness.

More Mueller Fallout

Washington Post, Romney slams Trump; Warren calls for impeachment, John Wagner and Colby Itkowitz​, April 19, 2019. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said he was “sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty” in the White House, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), in calling for impeachment, said both parties should “do their constitutional duty.”

Konstantin Kilimnik, right, a dual citizen of Russia and Ukraine who was Paul Manafort’s longtime business associate, said he is perplexed that he became the focus of special-counsel scrutiny and eventually faced criminal charges as a result of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

On a financial disclosure form, Pugh listed a $100,000 profit for one year from selling 20,000 copies of her self-published children’s books series “Healthy Holly” to the University of Maryland health system, which runs 13 hospitals including the state’s trauma unit in Baltimore and has connections with the state’s dental and medical schools.

WhoWhatWhy, The Mueller Report: Further Proof That a Savior Isn’t Coming, Jeff Schechtman, April 19, 2019. According to Sarah Kendzior, the Mueller Report doesn’t even scratch the surface of what’s been happening. In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Kendzior, the no-holds-barred commentator, calls special counsel Robert Mueller incompetent. She sees the country as being in the grip of an international crime syndicate, engaged in money laundering, fraud, and racketeering, with the express goal of bringing American democracy to its knees.

Kendzior tells Jeff Schechtman of her frustration with what she sees as an absence of moral courage and an unwillingness to acknowledge the magnitude of the country’s problems.

She explains why she thinks impeachment is absolutely necessary and asks, “if Trump isn’t impeachable, who is?” She wants to see O.J. Simpson–style hearings, live on TV, and on a daily basis, to make people aware of the criminality that she sees all around.

In fact, she says, a lot of the corruption started long before Trump, who she doesn’t believe is ever going to leave office willingly. She says that we have to stop believing that a savior is coming. From her perspective, most politicians seem to be hell-bent on letting America roll over and die.

Washington Post, Opinion: Robert Mueller failed to do his duty, Ronald A. Klain, right, April 19, 2019. Robert S. Mueller III is a distinguished public servant. But his much-anticipated report comes up short in many respects, and Democrats made a mistake to put so much confidence in it as the touchstone of accountability for President Trump and his campaign.

As a result, some Democrats on Capitol Hill are foolishly pointing to the report as a rationale for not pursuing a thorough investigation of the president and his team — a letdown for democracy resulting from a misguided buildup of Mueller (shown in a file photo).

The oft-repeated wisdom that Mueller (shown at left) “knew things we did not know” turned out to be vastly overestimated.

Many of Trump’s worst acts — his encouragement of Russia to illegally spy on his opponent; his repeated use of materials stolen by foreign intelligence assets as fodder for the campaign; the firings, inducements and intimidations to shut down investigations — were all known; the anticipation that Mueller still had “a smoking gun” in his pocket unfortunately normalized the ghastly things that were already public. It turns out — thanks to a combination of ongoing indictments and brilliant journalism — we had Mueller’s key findings months ago; their public release was more reprise than reveal.

But if expectations were too high for Mueller’s report, the inevitable disappointment was exacerbated by how Mueller fell short in what he delivered.

This starts with his failure to get Trump to answer questions in person. There was ample precedent for such insisting on such an interview: Bill Clinton testified before a grand jury in the Whitewater investigation; George W. Bush submitted to an interview with special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald about the Valerie Plame matter. In this case, with uncertainty about what the president knew about his son Donald Trump Jr.’s coordination with foreign hackers and meddlers; with the president at the center of lies about dealings and meetings with Russians; and with doubts about why the president did so many things to try to derail Mueller’s probe — commonly seen as indications of guilt — why didn’t Mueller press harder to question the president directly?

This reflects two mistakes of historic proportion. First, by delaying the question of Trump’s interview until month 19 of his tenure, Mueller allowed Trump to run out the clock — a grave tactical error. And second, in an investigation of this public import, getting “substantial evidence” but not the word of the president himself fails to fulfill the special responsibility of a special counsel. In a run-of-the-mill criminal case, a prosecutor’s decision to bypass questioning a difficult figure might make sense; when we are seeking to learn whether a presidential candidate worked with a hostile foreign power to win an election, the public deserves to have that candidate answer questions under oath.

Finally, some of Mueller’s other decisions should be publicly debated. His determination not to bring campaign finance charges against Trump Jr. for soliciting foreign assistance to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been blasted by one of the foremost election law experts, as it turned on a curious view that Mueller could not prove the value of the assistance Russians dangled in front of Trump Jr. (right), and that a prosecution for solicitation of foreign election assistance raised “First Amendment concerns.”

Most important, Mueller’s decision not to also bring charges against Trump Jr. — a private citizen, not protected by any Justice Department policy against prosecution — for conspiring with WikiLeaks (either as a violation of campaign finance laws or other statutes) remains a mystery given the extensive evidence of direct interactions between Trump Jr. and the WikiLeaks team. It is this Mueller decision — which enabled Trump’s “no collusion” boast — that merits the greatest scrutiny in the days ahead.

Alliance for Justice, Opinion: Congress, We're Looking at You, Bill Yeomans (right, Senior Justice Fellow at Alliance for Justice), April 19, 2019. The release of the redacted Mueller report spawned a gaggle of stories that each deserves extended treatment; the willingness of Bill Barr to lie on Trump’s behalf in acceptance of his role as Trump’s protector, rather than Attorney General of the United States; the detailed account of Russia’s assault on our elections; the Trump campaign’s embrace of the Russian assault and its failure to mention anything about it to the FBI or other authorities; the unfathomable culture of lying and deceit that permeated the Trump campaign and his White House; the continual elevation of self interest above country; and the extraordinary efforts of a desperate president to kill the investigation into all of this. But the country now faces one overriding question: Where do we go from here?

Trump and his supporters are working hard to spin the conclusion of the Mueller investigation as a victory, despite all the criminal charges, pleas, and convictions, and despite the 400-page narrative that paints a devastating portrait of Trump and the band of incompetent dissemblers and grifters with whom he surrounded himself. Trump’s gamble is that people will accept the headlines he churns out with support from Barr, congressional supporters, and Fox News. Indeed, few people are likely to wade through the details of the report.

A larger lesson arising from the details of this episode is that Trump is a president desperate to destroy all checks on his authority. Without the threat arising from the Mueller investigation hanging over his head, he will feel unleashed. The signs are already there.

Trump and his administration have demonstrated their intent to resist congressional oversight, including requests for information and subpoenas. Congressional oversight is essential to the proper functioning of our constitutional system and, in particular, to checking presidential power. It is the way Congress ensures that the laws it passes are enforced properly and the money it appropriates is being spent as intended. The Supreme Court has held that the scope of congressional oversight is broad, encompassing any matter that falls within Congress’s power to legislate. It is a principal component in the system of checks and balances that makes our government of separated powers work.

Trump wants none of it. It opens his personal conduct to scrutiny. It also restrains his ability to govern by whim, spite and personal desire. Having to answer to Congress curtails his authoritarian, strongman instincts. It impairs his ability to pursue his radical agenda.

If Trump stonewalls Congress, conflicts over subpoenas are likely to go to the courts. Trump, of course, has installed judges at a record pace, many of whom are unqualified and almost all of whom are ideological extremists who are likely to enable Trump’s resistance to oversight. Trump’s remaking of the courts – nearly a fifth of judges have been appointed by Trump – will dilute the ability of courts to restrain his power across the board.

The prospect of Trump unleashed is a principal reason why Congress must move rapidly toward impeachment. Congress must reimpose the threat of accountability. Whether or not impeachment results in his removal from office, the process will enlighten the public, which is unlikely to read Mueller’s report, but will watch with rapt attention as key participants in the Trump campaign and administration testify at televised hearings. That enlightenment may change the dynamic surrounding his removal. Admittedly, the power of Fox News and extreme partisanship pose high hurdles, but failure even to try will be an abdication of Congress’s constitutional responsibility to hold an unfit president accountable.

At this stage, the very real question looms; if Congress does not impeach Trump, is there anything left of the impeachment power? The Mueller report demonstrates that Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct that is far worse than anything Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton dared attempt.

Now that the report is out, Democratic fears of impeachment appear overblown. They misread history. The failed Republican effort to remove Clinton was followed by the election of George W. Bush. The effort to remove Trump is thoroughly consistent with – and indeed may even facilitate -- a Democratic victory in the 2020 presidential contest. Indeed, failure to move toward impeachment runs the risk of alienating Democrats’ base and making the party look weak and indecisive.

Uncertain Democrats should note the chorus of fearful Republican pundits warning Democrats that they would be foolhardy to impeach Trump. Remember, they do not have your best interests in mind.

Prince (shown in a file photo) later told congressional officials examining Russia’s interference in the presidential election that the meeting happened by chance and was not taken at the behest of the incoming administration — testimony that congressional Democrats now think was false.

Prince told special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators a version of the Seychelles meeting that is at odds in several key respects with his sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017.

As lawmakers absorb the Mueller report and plan their next steps, congressional officials said they are considering whether the discrepancies are egregious enough to refer the matter to the Justice Department to pursue possible perjury charges against Prince.

Politico, Trump campaign punishes Don McGahn's law firm, Nancy Cook, April 19, 2019. 'Why in the world would you want to put your enemy on the payroll?' said one adviser close to the White House. The Trump campaign has hired its own in-house attorney for its 2020 reelection bid — shifting future business away from Jones Day, the law firm, that has represented Trump since his first run for president.

Campaign officials and advisers cast the decision to hire Nathan Groth — a former lawyer for the Republican National Committee and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — as a money-saving move, supported by the businessman-turned-president who loves to cut costs.

But close Trump advisers say the decision also stems from disappointment with the White House’s former top attorney and current Jones Day partner, Don McGahn, right, whose behavior has irked the president and some of his family members.

Taking business away from Jones Day is payback, these advisers say, for McGahn’s soured relationship with the Trump family and a handful articles in high-profile newspapers that the family blames, unfairly or not, on the former White House counsel.

U.S. Crime, Courts

Californian Louise Turpin and her husband David Turpin shown in mugshots after their arrests for mistreating 12 of their 13 children.

A Florida man was arrested Friday and accused of making threatening phone calls to Democratic officials in which he allegedly ranted in racist terms about Muslims, black people and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). John Kless, 49, of the Fort Lauderdale area, was charged with making an interstate threat, a crime punishable by up to five years in prison.

Trump Flip-flops On Libya

New York Times, In Sharp Policy Reversal, Trump Endorses Libyan Strongman, David D. Kirkpatrick, April 19, 2019. The United States previously condemned the militia leader Khalifa Hifter for trying to depose a United Nations-backed government. President Trump on Friday abruptly reversed American policy toward Libya, issuing a statement publicly endorsing an aspiring strongman in his battle to depose the United Nations-backed government.

The would-be strongman, Khalifa Hifter (shown in a 2011 file photo via Wikipedia), launched a surprise attack on the Libyan capital, Tripoli, more than two weeks ago. Relief agencies said Thursday that more than 200 people had been killed in the battle, and in recent days Mr. Hifter’s forces have started shelling civilian neighborhoods.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement a few days after Mr. Hifter’s militia began its attack that “the administration at the highest levels” had made clear that “we oppose the military offensive” and “urge the immediate halt to these military operations.” Most Western governments and the United Nations have also condemned the attack and demanded a retreat. Mr. Trump, however, told Mr. Hifter almost the opposite, the White House said Friday.

National Enquirer Sold

New York Times, National Enquirer to Be Sold to James Cohen, Heir to Hudson News Founder, Edmund Lee, April 18, 2019. A new buyer for the tabloid swooped in after talks between its publisher, American Media, and the billionaire Ron Burkle fell apart. The National Enquirer, President Trump’s favorite supermarket tabloid, is about to have a new owner: James Cohen, a son of the founder of the Hudson News franchise. American Media Inc., The Enquirer’s publisher, announced the deal Thursday.

The money-losing title was put up for sale several weeks ago, after its principal owner decided it no longer wanted to be associated with the magazine, according to several people familiar with the matter. The publication attracted the scrutiny of federal investigators for its role in the 2016 presidential campaign.

American Media had been in talks with several potential buyers, including the California billionaire Ronald W. Burkle. After those talks fell apart last week, Mr. Cohen, whose father started the chain of Hudson News shops, swooped in to buy the troubled tabloid.

As part of the deal, American Media, led by David J. Pecker, left, a longtime friend of Mr. Trump’s, has also agreed to sell two of its other tabloids: the Globe and the National Examiner. The Washington Post first reported the sale, which it pegged at $100 million.

The principal owner of American Media, the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, led by Anthony Melchiorre, pushed Mr. Pecker to sell The Enquirer after the publication found itself under federal investigation. Mr. Melchiorre no longer saw an upside in being associated with the tabloid, whose financial losses and falling circulation numbers provided further motivation for a sale.

Mr. Pecker is said to have helped Mr. Trump’s candidacy through a deal American Media struck with Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who said she had an affair with the president. The company acquired her story for $150,000 and never published it, a practice known in the tabloid business as catch-and-kill. Federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York gave Mr. Pecker an immunity deal in its investigation of the arrangement.

American Media also signed a non-prosecution deal with federal prosecutors. As part of the agreement, the company affirmed that it had made the payment to Ms. McDougal to “influence the election.” The deal, signed in September, also stipulated that American Media “shall commit no crimes whatsoever” for three years and that, if it did, the company “shall thereafter be subject to prosecution for any federal criminal violation of which this office has knowledge.”

That agreement put American Media in a ticklish position, now that federal prosecutors have started investigating claims by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, that he was threatened by the company. Mr. Bezos was the subject of an 11-page Enquirer investigation headlined “Bezos’ Divorce! The Cheating Photos That Ended His Marriage.” In a lengthy blog post a month after the article appeared, Mr. Bezos accused American Media of extortion.

Hudson News, founded by Mr. Cohen’s father, Robert B. Cohen, was sold to the Swiss retail company Dufry in 2008. Mr. Cohen is no longer involved in the chain of newspaper and magazine shops but sits on the board of the new parent company.

Heavy, James Cohen: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know, Kate Prengel, April 19 2019. James Cohen is a magazine distributor and heir to Hudson News. Cohen is also set to become the new owner of the National Enquirer. The tabloid and its parent company, American Media International, have been embroiled in scandal ever since news broke that the National Enquirer had helped cover up rumors of Donald Trump’s reported affair with a woman named Karen McDougal.

Last year, AMI admitted that it had payed McDougal (shown in a screeenshot) $150,000 as part of a “catch and kill” deal which prevented McDougal from going public with her story about her alleged relationship with Donald Trump. More recently, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos accused the National Enquirer of extortion after the tabloid published a series of texts between Bezos and his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez. The National Enquirer reportedly payed $200,000 to Sanchez’s brother in return for those texts.

In early April, AMI announced that it had plans to sell the National Enquirer. On April 18, the company said it had reached a $100 million deal with James Cohen. Cohen will also receive the Globe and the National Examiner, which are also owned by AMI, as part of the deal.

In a previous blog post, I warned that the media and political class would continue with their long-running deceptions about Julian Assange now that he has been dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy. They have wasted no time in proving me right.

Rather than focus on the gross violation of Assange’s fundamental human rights, the wider assault on press freedoms and the attack on Americans’ First Amendment Rights, U.K. politicians are “debating” whether the U.S. extradition claim on Assange should take priority over earlier Swedish extradition proceedings for a sexual-assault investigation that was publicly dropped back in 2017.

In other words, the public conversation in the U.K., sympathetically reported by The Guardian, supposedly Britain’s only major liberal news outlet, is going to be about who has first dibs on Assange.

What these U.K. MPs and The Guardian have done in this front-page story is muddy the waters yet further, with enthusiastic disregard for the damage it might do to Assange’s rights, to Corbyn’s leadership and to the future of truth-telling journalism.

1. Trump did try to sabotage the investigation. His staff defied him.2. So many lies. So many changed stories.3. Fake news? Not so much.4. No obstruction? Not so fast.5. Evading an F.B.I. interview proved a successful strategy.6. No conclusive evidence of conspiracy, but lots of reason to investigate.7. Imagine reading this report cold.

Above the Law, Robert Mueller Didn’t Finish The Job, And We’ll Never Know Why, Elie Mystal, April 18, 2019. The Mueller report treats Trump and his family with kid gloves.If you ever have the opportunity to choose who will prosecute you for you potential crimes, ask to be prosecuted by Robert Mueller. Apparently, he will spend half of his time making your legal arguments for you, and will not try to secure your testimony under oath if it looks like you’ll give him too much trouble.

I have read through (well, scrolled through) the entire Mueller report, and I am deeply dissatisfied with the thoroughness of Mueller’s investigation. Yes, yes, I know, I’m supposed to parrot the line about how “thorough” this investigation was because… it took a lot of time and the report is very long.

Big whoop. For all the time spent on it, and the obvious meticulous dedication to the cause, Mueller did not finish the job. Maybe he was pressured by new Attorney General William Barr. Maybe the constant drumbeat of “wrap it up” coming from the Trump administration wore him down. Maybe we’ll never know. But the 22-month investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and President Donald Trump’s potential obstruction of justice punted investigative functions to Congress that his office should have completed before turning over his report.

And that’s because Mueller declined to seek subpoenas to compel testimony from Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, or Eric Trump. Mueller was willing to put the screws to everybody else. Paul Manafort is in jail; Michael Cohen is going to jail. Michael Flynn is going to jail; Robert Gates is going to jail; Roger Stone will most likely be going to jail. Many of these people are going to jail because they lied to Robert Mueller. But the First Family is not going to jail. And it’s not because they are innocent. It’s because Mueller refused to ask them a damned question.

As has been widely understood — and now confirmed with the release of the report — Mueller made the decision that his office did not have the authority to charge President Donald Trump with a crime. That’s… a questionable legal conclusion. I can more or less accept it on the issue of conspiracy with Russia to influence the election. But when it comes to obstruction of justice, I just can’t. Literally, what is the point of having an “independent,” “non-political” appointee conduct an investigation into the President if only political appointees and elected officials can actually do anything about it? It’s like hiring a restaurant critic who isn’t allowed to eat the food.

Washington Post, Opinion: Trump is a cancer on the presidency. Congress should remove him, George T. Conway III (right, a lawyer in New York prominent in conservative legal circles and married to President Trump's senior communications adviser Kellyanne Conway), April 18, 2019. So it turns out that, indeed, President Trump was not exonerated at all, and certainly not “totally” or “completely,” as he claimed.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III didn’t reach a conclusion about whether Trump committed crimes of obstruction of justice — in part because, while a sitting president, Trump can’t be prosecuted under long-standing Justice Department directives, and in part because of “difficult issues” raised by “the President’s actions and intent.” Those difficult issues involve, among other things, the potentially tricky interplay between the criminal obstruction laws and the president’s constitutional authority, and the difficulty in proving criminal intent beyond a reasonable doubt.

Still, the special counsel’s report is damning. Mueller couldn’t say, with any “confidence,” that the president of the United States is not a criminal. He said, stunningly, that “if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.” Mueller did not so state.

That’s especially damning because the ultimate issue shouldn’t be — and isn’t — whether the president committed a criminal act. As I wrote not long ago, Americans should expect far more than merely that their president not be provably a criminal. In fact, the Constitution demands it.

Attorney General William Barr, center, flanked by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, right, and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Edward O'Callaghan of the National Security Division at the Justice Department news conference on April 18, 2019 (screenshot).

Washington Post, Analysis: William Barr just did Trump another huge favor, Aaron Blake, April 18, 2019. When Attorney General William P. Barr announced he was going to hold a news conference before the release of the Mueller report Thursday, there was instant pushback. How can the media ask questions about a report it hasn’t seen? Would this just be a whole bunch of pre-spin from a man already accused of being too friendly to the president who appointed him?

Barr’s performance did nothing to argue against those allegations.

In a lengthy opening statement, Barr found just about every way possible to say that there was no coordination, cooperation or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. He also said Trump was right about “no collusion,” expanding the Mueller report’s clearing of Trump to a more nebulous term with little legal significance.

But perhaps more importantly, on obstruction of justice, he seemed to go to bat for Trump personally, offering a sympathetic take on the president’s state of mind and cooperation.

Not all of Robert S. Mueller III’s findings will be news to President Trump when they are released Thursday.

Justice Department officials have had numerous conversations with White House lawyers about the conclusions made by Mr. Mueller, the special counsel, in recent days, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. The talks have aided the president’s legal team as it prepares a rebuttal to the report and strategizes for the coming public war over its findings.

A sense of paranoia was taking hold among some of Mr. Trump’s aides, some of whom fear his backlash more than the findings themselves, the people said. The report might make clear which of Mr. Trump’s current and former advisers spoke to the special counsel, how much they said and how much damage they did to the president — providing a kind of road map for retaliation.

The discussions between Justice Department officials and White House lawyers have also added to questions about the propriety of the decisions by Attorney General William P. Barr since he received Mr. Mueller’s findings late last month. Barr is shown at right in a screenshot showing also Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Media on Mueller / Barr

Palmer Report, Opinion: William Barr comes out swinging, punches himself in the face, falls down, Bill Palmer, April 18, 2019.So much for whatever Donald Trump’s handpicked Attorney General William Barr thought he was trying to accomplish with his press conference this morning. Perhaps Barr thought he could get the media to do his bidding for him today. After all, most major media outlets initially went along with his “summary” of the Mueller report. But this time, to its immense credit, the media had zero interest in taking Barr at his word – and the whole thing quickly blew up in his face.

Barr may have accomplished one goal this morning, in the sense that he managed to go on television and convince Donald Trump that the Mueller report was somehow good for him. Sure enough, Trump tweeted “No obstruction, no collusion… Game Over.” But in the hour-plus since the redacted Mueller report was released, Trump hasn’t tweeted anything else about it – and with good reason.

The Mueller report is so profoundly ugly for Donald Trump, particularly on obstruction of justice, but also on collusion, the only prevailing headlines coming out of this day are focused on precisely that. Barr’s press conference didn’t even make a dent, unless you count the sidebar coverage about how dishonest Barr was during his press conference.

We don’t know precisely what House Democrats will do with this treasure trove of damning evidence against Donald Trump; as a first step they’re calling for Robert Mueller to publicly testify about his report, and he’ll surely oblige. But if House Democrats want to impeach William Barr for obstruction of justice, Barr just served himself up on a silver platter this morning. Barr was only performing for Trump’s benefit – but unfortunately for Barr, everyone else was watching too.

U.S. Media & Politics

New York Times, 2020 Democrats Seek Voters in an Unusual Spot: Fox News, Michael M. Grynbaum and Sydney Ember, April 18, 2019 (print ed.). President Trump’s favorite network, known for conservative commentary, is increasingly playing host to Democratic presidential hopefuls. The debate about whether to appear on Fox News programs reflects a larger divide in the Democratic Party as it ponders how to retake the White House.

Abortion Bans Gain In States

New York Times, How Banning Abortion in the Early Weeks of Pregnancy Suddenly Became Mainstream, Sabrina Tavernise. April 18, 2019. For years, Ohio Right to Life, the state’s largest and oldest anti-abortion group, steered clear of a bill that would ban abortion in the very early weeks of pregnancy — after a fetal heartbeat is detected. The reason was simple. The bill, which would have been the toughest abortion restriction on record, would be dead on arrival once it reached an unfriendly Supreme Court.

But after seven years of avoiding the ban, Ohio Right to Life’s board gathered in an office building outside Toledo in November and voted unanimously to support it.

The reversal is evidence of a fundamental shift in the landscape of abortion in America. The math on the Supreme Court has changed with President Trump’s choice of Brett Kavanaugh last year. And now, in the first legislative cycle after the midterm elections last fall, states are rushing to make changes. Newly confident red states are passing some of the strictest prohibitions the country has ever seen. Blue states are enacting ever stronger protections, like ones for later-term abortions in New York and Virginia.

Grayzone via Consortium News, Opinion: How Ecuador’s President Gave Up Assange, Denis Rogatyuk, April 18, 2019. Lenin Moreno was desperate to ingratiate his government with Washington and distract the public from his mounting scandals, writes the Grayzone’s Denis Rogatyuk (Russian-Australian freelance writer, journalist and researcher).

The images of six Metropolitan police officers dragging Julian Assange out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London have enraged citizens around the world. Many have warned that if he is extradited to the U.S. for trial on conspiracy charges – and possibly much more if federal prosecutors have their way – it will lead to the criminalization of many standard journalistic practices. These scenes were only possible thanks to the transformation of Ecuador’s government under the watch of President Lenin Moreno.

Since at least December 2018, Moreno has been working towards expelling the Wikileaks publisher from the embassy. The Ecuadorian president’s behavior represents a stunning reversal of the policies of his predecessor, Rafael Correa, the defiantly progressive leader who authorized Assange’s asylum back in 2012, and who now lives in exile.

While Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Jose Valencia blamed his government’s expulsion of Assange on the Australian journalist’s “rudeness,” the sellout is clearly a byproduct of Moreno’s right-leaning agenda.

Political instability has swept across Ecuador since revelations of widespread corruption in Moreno’s inner circle emerged. The scandal coincided with Moreno’s turn towards neoliberal economic reforms, from implementing a massive IMF loan package to the gradual and total embrace and support for U.S. foreign policy in the region. In his bid to satisfy Washington and deflect from his own problems, Moreno was all too eager to sacrifice Assange.

WikiLeaks’s decision to re-publish the details of Moreno’s use of off-shore bank accounts in Panama, titled “INA Papers” after the name of the shell corporation at the center of the scandal (INA Investment Corporation), appear to be the main cause for the president’s decision to expel Assange from the embassy.

Ecuadorian Communications Minister Andrés Michelena went as far as claiming that the INA Papers were a conspiracy plot between Julian Assange, the former President Rafael Correa and the current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The INA Papers scandal has cast a long shadow on Moreno’s regime and shattered its pledge to fight against institutional corruption. The scandal reveals that a close associate of Moreno, Xavier Macias, lobbied for the contract of the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric power plant (valued at $2.8 billion) as well as the ZAMORA 3000 MW plant to be awarded Sinohydro, a Chinese state-owned construction company.

The financial trail from the Chinese corporation passed through bank accounts in Panama belonging to INA Investment Corporation — a shell company originally founded in Belize, a notable tax haven, by Edwin Moreno Garcés, the brother of the current president. The most crucial pieces of evidence indicate that the INA Investment funds were used to purchase a large apartment in Alicante, Spain, and a number of luxury items for Moreno and his family in Geneva, during his time as a special envoy on disability rights for the United Nations.

Telesur, Argentina's Biggest Newspaper El Clarin Fires 56 Journalists Without Warning, Staff report, April 18, 2019. Dozens of journalists Wednesday could not enter to work at the newspaper El Clarin in Buenos Aires because this private company fired them without any sign of courtesy to their years of service. "I was the Sports editor until yesterday. I worked almost forty years here. Like my colleagues, I received an email informing us we have been thrown out," Guillermo Tagliaferri said and commented that job losses are happening throughout Argentina due to "an economic policy that destroys working places and does not respects worker's rights."

The newspaper facilities remained guarded to prevent 56 journalists from trying to enter. Nevertheless, the fired workers immediately started a rally outside El Clarin.

"We are on a 24-hour demonstration against 56 dismissals which were carried forward with the methods of fear such as police, fences, blacklists," journalist Daniel Mecca reported through social networks.

The company did not give further explanations except a statement from Manager Hector Aranda, who argued a "reengineering process" that required "renewing jobs, adding new capabilities and also resizing areas to ensure a balanced transition."

A week before, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released a study of El Clarin media group found that the corporation publishes the best-selling newspaper, controls provincial newspapers, manages the second largest open TV network, and is an important shareholder in the only paper factory Argentina has.

"The Clarín Group is also the main beneficiary of the government's advertising," local media Las Heras recalled.

According to RT data, 75 percent of the Argentine media outlets have already experienced job losses leaving 3,500 workers unemployed since Mauricio Macri came to power in 2016. In Argentina, the current unemployment rate is 9.1 percent while poverty is at 32 percent.

Watergate CIA Conspirator Dies

Washington Post, Watergate conspirator James McCord Jr. died two years ago. His death was never announced, Emily Langer, Harrison Smith and Kate Morgan, April 18, 2019. James W. McCord Jr., a retired CIA employee who was convicted as a conspirator in the Watergate burglary and later linked the 1972 break-in to the White House in revelations that helped end the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, died June 15, 2017, at his home in Douglassville, Pa. He was 93.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, according to his death certificate obtained at the Berks County Register of Wills office in Reading, Pa.

Mr. McCord’s death was first reported in “Dirty Tricks,” a 2018 history of the Watergate investigation by filmmaker Shane O’Sullivan. But the news did not appear in local or national media outlets and surfaced online only in March, when the website Kennedys and King published an obituary referencing his gravesite in Pennsylvania.

April 17

U.S. Support For Saudi Atrocities To Continue

Washington Post, Trump vetoes resolution to end U.S. participation in Yemen’s civil war, Felicia Sonmez, Josh Dawsey and Karoun Demirjian, April 17, 2019 (print ed.). The president called the measure “an unnecessary, dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities.” It had passed the House on a 247-to-175 vote and was approved by the Senate with the support of seven Republicans.

U.S. Immigration Policy

New York Times, In New Effort to Deter Migrants, Barr Withholds Bail to Asylum Seekers, Michael D. Shear and Katie Benner, April 16, 2019. The Trump administration on Tuesday took another significant step to discourage migrants from seeking asylum, issuing an order that could keep thousands of them in jail indefinitely while they wait for a resolution of their asylum requests.

The order issued by Attorney General William P. Barr, right, was an effort to deliver on President Trump’s promise to end the “catch and release” of migrants crossing the border in hopes of escaping persecution in their home countries.

The order — which directs immigration judges to deny some migrants a chance to post bail — will not go into effect for 90 days. It is all but certain to be challenged in federal court, but immigrant rights lawyers said it could undermine the basic rights of people seeking safety in the United States.

Epstein recruited Roberts while she was working as a towel girl at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, located close to Epstein's Palm Beach estate. Epstein was and may continue to be a member of Mar-a-Lago. Mar-a-Lago's membership lists are kept confidential.

New York Times, The Mueller Report Will Be Released on Thursday. Here’s a Guide, Sharon LaFraniere, April 17, 2019. After 23 months, the results of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, are set to be released to the public. The nearly 400-page report is likely to tell us about Russia’s 2016 election interference and President Trump’s efforts to control federal inquiries.

After 23 months, 500 search warrants, 2,300 subpoenas and a string of indictments, the results of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, will be public on Thursday in a nearly 400-page report. The treatise is likely to add significantly to our understanding of Russia’s 2016 election interference and President Trump’s efforts to control federal inquiries into the matter.

Attorney General William P. Barr said last month that the special counsel did not find that anyone associated with the Trump campaign worked with the Russian government to illegally influence the election. He also said there was insufficient evidence that Mr. Trump illegally obstructed justice. But Americans have been eagerly waiting to hear from Mr. Mueller’s investigators in their own words.

Whether you have followed every step of the investigation or are tuning in after months of avoiding the headlines, here is a primer for the report’s release.

Washington Post, Opinion: If Congress wants the unredacted Mueller report, here’s how to get it, Harry Litman (shown in a screenshot), April 17, 2019 (print ed.). The Justice Department has announced that it will deliver special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report to Congress and the public on Thursday morning, but with redactions of grand jury information (and other categories of information) that will leave innumerable gaps in our understanding of what Mueller uncovered. Many commentators have suggested that Congress’s only mechanism for securing an unredacted report is to launch a formal impeachment inquiry — a blind step forward with great political risks for congressional Democrats and the party overall.

That unpleasant choice looked to be the upshot of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit’s recent 2-to-1 decision in McKeever v. Barr, which held that the courts lack “inherent power” to order disclosure of grand jury material and instead must hew to the six exceptions describing when such material can be released — exceptions that are delineated in Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

One of those six is disclosure “preliminary to or in connection with a judicial proceeding.” And while it may seem anomalous, several courts have held — and the D.C. Circuit in McKeever expressly affirmed — that “judicial proceeding” within the meaning of the rule encompasses an impeachment inquiry by Congress.

It suggested that the House would be entitled to all the materials — unredacted — only if it first launched a formal impeachment inquiry. And because the Democratic leadership seems loath, for political reasons, to take that step, the prospects for proceeding under that exception — the only known avenue for procuring the unredacted report — looked stalemated.

But that’s not correct. In fact, Congress has immediate recourse to seek the unredacted report pursuant to the ”judicial proceeding” exception, without having to initiate an impeachment inquiry.

How do we know? Well, for starters, we need look no further than the Starr investigation of President Bill Clinton (right) and the succeeding impeachment proceedings in Congress. In September 1998, before the House had initiated an impeachment inquiry, independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr sought and received from federal district court an order to provide to Congress his report, including voluminous grand jury materials. The court’s order granting the request provided expressly that it constituted an order for purposes of the “judicial proceeding” exception in the federal rules.

It was only after digesting Starr’s report, and based upon the report, that the House decided to initiate an impeachment proceeding.

The necessary conclusion of the Starr precedent is that “preliminary to" covers circumstances in which Congress seeks a report to determine in the first place whether to launch impeachment proceedings. It follows that the House needn’t first launch a formal impeachment inquiry to get the unredacted report.

The attorney general and Rep. Douglas A. Collins (Ga.), the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, have suggested that nearly everything about Starr’s report is irrelevant to current circumstances because Starr was an independent counsel operating under a different statutory scheme than did Mueller. As, of course, he was.

But so what? The court’s express holding in response to the Starr motion was that its order applied to Rule 6(e); otherwise put, the transmission of grand jury material was proper because Congress needed it to determine whether to initiate a formal impeachment inquiry. It is difficult to see how Collins, Barr or the Justice Department could make a tenable argument to the contrary.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump has completely incoherent late night meltdown about how much he now hates Fox News, Bill Palmer, April 17, 2019. Donald Trump has suddenly become enraged about Bernie Sanders – not because he has anything bad to say about Bernie, and not necessarily because he thinks Bernie will even be the 2020 nominee, but because Bernie did a town hall on Trump’s favorite channel Fox News, and it went fairly well. That alone is enough to set off a malignant narcissist like Trump, and sure enough, he finally exploded about it on Tuesday evening.

First, Donald Trump posted this bizarre tweet, which gave away just how insecure he’s feeling about the whole thing: “Many Trump Fans & Signs were outside of the Fox News Studio last night in the now thriving (Thank you President Trump) Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, for the interview with Crazy Bernie Sanders. Big complaints about not being let in-stuffed with Bernie supporters. What’s with Fox News?” Aw, Trump got his feelings hurt because Fox isn’t kissing his butt as thoroughly as it used to.

Then Trump went on to inexplicably demand that Sanders pay more taxes. This was even as Trump continues to try to delay the Treasury Department’s inevitable release of Trump’s tax returns, because all kinds of dirty secrets are obviously lurking in there. But then Trump decided for some reason that this would be a good thing to tweet: “I believe it will be Crazy Bernie Sanders vs. Sleepy Joe Biden as the two finalists to run against maybe the best Economy in the history of our Country (and MANY other great things)! I look forward to facing whoever it may be. May God Rest Their Soul!”

The real upshot here is that Trump is very jealous that Fox News isn’t as thoroughly in his corner as it used to be. Trump is as insecure as he is incoherent.

WhoWhatWhy, Soros, DHS Whistleblowers Urge More Truth-Telling, Celia Wexler, April 17, 2019. For whistleblowers, it’s the Emmys, the Grammys, and the Oscars rolled into one. The Ridenhour Prizes mark the one time each year that they and their supporters are celebrated for their important and often dangerous work.

The ceremony, founded in 2003 and held in Washington at the National Press Club, also honors journalists — but is rarely covered by the media. Named after Ron Ridenhour — a Vietnam veteran who became an investigative reporter — the event honors those individuals who “persevere in acts of truth-telling that protect the public interest, promote social justice,” or advance “a more just vision of society.”

For decades, philanthropist George Soros has invested millions of dollars in his Open Society Foundations, which support democratic and human rights initiatives across the globe. After successfully encouraging democratic reforms in Europe and elsewhere, Soros now is bucking new political leaders who are preaching nationalism, assuming dictatorial powers, and silencing critics.

Prosecutors will also release video showing 24 other men charged in the months-long, multi-jurisdictional sting that allegedly ensnared Kraft in February, according to ocuments filed by the Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office. As custodian of the records, prosecutors say state law compels them to release the evidence to the media. They will "pixelate or blur depictions of obscene or pornographic images before releasing such records to the public, absent a court order." It was not clear when the video will be released.

A federal judge in Virginia ordered that Lindh, 38, can't have an internet-capable device without permission from his probation office, can’t view or access extremist or terrorism videos, and must allow the probation office to monitor his internet use.

"Given the rare nature of defendant's crime and his unique personal history and characteristics, the probation officer recently filed a request asking the court to impose additional special conditions of supervised release which will govern defendant's behavior post-confinement," Judge T.S. Ellis III (shown at left in a file photo) wrote in court papers filed earlier this month.

Lindh was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2002 after he pleaded guilty to supplying services to the Taliban and carrying explosives in commission of a felony. Under the terms of the sentence, his probation will last for three years.

Lindh is scheduled to be released from federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, on May 23.

In addition to the internet restrictions, the judge ordered that Lindh can’t communicate with anyone online in any language other than English. Ellis also ruled that Lindh can’t leave the United States without permission of the court, and that he must undergo mental health counseling.

Court filings show that Lindh initially opposed the restrictions but dropped his objections after consulting with a lawyer.

Ellis said that Lindh can seek to modify some or all of the special restrictions if he adjusts well to his supervised release.

Consumer Protection: Meat

Washington Post, Consumers are buying contaminated meat, doctors’ group says in lawsuit, Kimberly Kindy, April 17, 2019. USDA said it “disagrees with the underlying assumption that meat and poultry products bearing the mark of inspection are likely to be contaminated with feces.” A group of doctors has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, pushing for new rules to prohibit the sale of raw poultry, pork and beef that contain traces of animal waste — something that is currently allowed under law.

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit group composed of 12,000 doctor members, is also seeking to have the word “wholesome” removed from the inspection label of poultry products. Instead, the group, which advocates for improving human and animal lives through plant-based diets, is proposing a new warning label for both poultry and meat that would alert consumers to the possibility that the products may contain fecal matter.

USDA says it has a “zero tolerance” policy for fecal contamination in poultry and meat-processing plants, but this applies only if the fecal contamination is visible.

The legal action comes days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that E. coli-contaminated ground beef was the suspected culprit in an outbreak that has infected at least 109 people in six states. CDC says 17 people have been hospitalized, though no deaths have been reported.

CDC estimates 48 million people get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases each year in the United States.

The hedge fund, which is the controlling owner of such newspapers as the Denver Post and Boston Herald under the brand MediaNews Group, in some cases moved 90 percent of retirees’ savings into two funds it controlled, according to public records filed with the Labor Department. Most of the money has now been moved back out of the hedge funds. Note: It also owns the St. Paul Pioneer Press, The Mercury News of San Jose, the East Bay Times, and The Orange County Register.

Federal law generally requires that pension managers avoid conflicts of interest and avoid taking excessive risks with the assets they manage, experts said, though some exemptions are allowed.

Alden is being investigated by the Department of Labor for management of its pensions, a hedge fund spokesman confirmed. The specific nature of the investigation is unclear, but one person familiar with the agency’s inquiry, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is confidential, said the department issued subpoenas to Alden and its partners last year.

The inquiry could become a factor in Alden’s effort to acquire what is now the nation’s largest chain of daily newspapers, Gannett, including USA Today, as at least one prominent lawmaker raises questions about how it would manage the company’s pensions. Alden has faced criticism for its stewardship of local newspapers the company has purchased. Research shows it cuts jobs more rapidly than other owners.

Its subsidiary MediaNews Group, formerly known as Digital First Media, buys newspapers, often reduces jobs and sells off the buildings. For three months, MediaNews Group has been trying to acquire McLean, Va.-based Gannett and its more than 100 newspapers.

A spokesman for MediaNews Group, Hugh Burns, confirmed the Labor Department’s investigation and issued a statement denying any violations of the federal law protecting private pension holders, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA).

“MNG believes that Alden’s management of the pension plan assets for which it provided management services has at all times complied with all legal requirements, including ERISA,” he said in a statement.

FCC Bans China Mobile

New York Times, F.C.C. Chair Plans to Block China Mobile From U.S. Market, Cecilia Kang, April 17, 2019. Ajit Pai, right, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday that he would oppose China Mobile’s application to provide cell service to Americans because of security concerns, sinking the company’s chances of entering the United States market.

Maria Farmer, then 26, claims she was employed by Epstein (right), a multimillionaire financier who lived in a vast mansion on New York’s Upper East Side, and that she frequently saw “school-age girls’’ wearing uniforms come into the mansion and go upstairs. She was told that the girls were auditioning for modeling work, according to her affidavit.

Then an art student in New York, Farmer said she reported her assault to New York police and the FBI in 1996. FBI documents released April 1 make a reference to Farmer having been interviewed in 2006 or 2007. However, Farmer, now 49, said the FBI did not take any action against Epstein and Maxwell.

“To my knowledge, I was the first person to report Maxwell and Epstein to the FBI. It took a significant amount of bravery for me to make that call because I knew how incredibly powerful and influential both Epstein and Maxwell were, particularly in the art community,’’ she wrote.

Farmer’s affidavit is one of 15 exhibits attached to a defamation complaint filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, against Alan Dershowitz, one of Epstein’s most vocal and powerful attorneys.

Giuffre claims in the lawsuit, as she has in past court filings, that Dershowitz, 80 (shown with Epstein in a file photo), knew about and participated in a sex-trafficking operation involving underage girls and run by Epstein and Maxwell, and that she was forced to have sex with Dershowitz and other prominent, wealthy men when she was underage.

Dershowitz has railed against the allegations for years, maintaining that he has never met Giuffre. He also says he has documents and other evidence that prove she is lying.

Alternet, Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has been secretly funneling cash to celebrities and universities, Brad Reed, April 16, 2019. Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has set up a secret charity foundation that he’s been using to funnel money to assorted celebrities and elite universities. The Daily Beast reports that Epstein has created a private foundation called Gratitude America, Ltd. that has been shelling out cash to nonprofit groups founded by Deepak Chopra, Elton John and even a doctor with connections to President Donald Trump.

Additionally, the Daily Beast’s review of the foundation’s tax filings has found that it helped fund “an all-girls school in Manhattan, a youth tennis program, cancer charities, Harvard’s famous theater troupe, posh New York arts societies at Lincoln Center and the Met, and a nonprofit linked to the wife of a former Harvard president who flew on Epstein’s private jet.”

The foundation does nothing to publicize its existence and the only traces of its activity are found through its tax filings. Epstein launched the organization in 2012, three years after he had served an 18-month prison sentence after he pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage prostitute.

Epstein received such a light sentence even though dozens of women have accused him of sexually abusing them when they were teenagers. Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra’s ruled that current Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta broke the law when he crafted a plea deal for Epstein that did not inform his multiple female accusers.

The spine-tingling, soul-lifting spire (shown above in a BBC screenshot) and roof of Notre Dame Cathedral were reduced to ash Monday, as a catastrophic fire spread through a building that has embodied the heart of Paris for more than 800 years.

In an address to the nation just before midnight, President Emmanuel Macron said the worst had been avoided, that the exterior structure had been preserved and that the cathedral would rise again.

New York Times, How the Notre-Dame Cathedral Fire Spread, Staff report, April 16, 2019 (print ed.). It took less than an hour for a fire to spread from the attic of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, race across the wooden rooftop and topple its 300-foot spire.

Around 6:30 p.m., Paris time, smoke began to pour out of the cathedral’s roof, near scaffolding that had been put up over the last few months to conduct renovations on the spire

The fire started in the cathedral’s attic, said Jean-Claude Gallet, commander of the Paris firefighters. The attic is an oddly shaped space, seldom visited, that lies above the soaring stone arches visible from the floor of old European cathedrals. Diagrams of Notre-Dame and official descriptions of the space indicate that it is crisscrossed by giant, timber trusses that add structural integrity to the cathedral.

“Once these massive timber structures start to burn, they almost never can be stopped,” said Jonathan Barnett, an international fire safety authority at Basic Expert in Australia. “We focus on their masonry walls and forget all the massive timber within.”

The blaze quickly spread across the wooden roof and engulfed the spire, a wood-frame structure covered in lead. Within minutes, the spire collapsed, toppling to the side before breaking off.

Fire safety experts said houses of worship can pose special problems for firefighters. The cathedral’s wood roof, for instance, is made of a flammable material and is difficult to reach. “These cathedrals and houses of worship are built to burn. If they weren’t houses of worship, they’d be condemned,” said Vincent Dunn, a fire consultant and former New York City fire chief.

Notre-Dame is located directly in the center of the city on a small island called Île de la Cité, which may have been more difficult for firefighters and emergency workers to reach. As of 8:30 p.m., Paris time, all roads on the island were closed.

Trump-Polish Alliance

Bloomberg, Poland and U.S. Closing In on Deal to Build ‘Fort Trump,’ Sources Say, Jennifer Jacobs, Justin Sink, Nick Wadhams and Marek Strzelecki, April 16, 2019. Poland is nearing a deal with the U.S. to establish an American military base in the former Communist bloc country, according to people familiar with the matter -- an outpost the Poles see as a deterrent to Russian aggression and that the Kremlin would likely consider a provocation.

If a deal is reached, President Donald Trump is considering traveling to Poland in the fall, in part to commemorate the agreement. But it’s unclear whether he fully supports the idea, even after he said during a September meeting with Polish President Andrzsej Duda that the U.S. was looking “very seriously” at establishing a base. Duda, who joked that it could be named “Fort Trump,” remains committed to contribute $2 billion for its construction.

Trump Probes

New York Times, Deutsche Bank Is Subpoenaed for Trump Records by House Democrats, Emily Flitter and David Enrich, April 16, 2019 (print ed.). Subpoenas from the House’s Financial Services and Intelligence committees were the latest attempts by congressional Democrats to collect information about the finances of President Trump.

Palmer Report, Opinion: House Democrats are closing in on Donald Trump in six different ways at once, Bill Palmer, April 16, 2019. This week the Trump regime will release a dishonestly redacted version of the Mueller report, aimed at making Donald Trump look like less of a criminal than he is. And Trump’s Treasury Department will continue to illegally refuse to release Trump’s tax returns. But even as House Democrats continue fighting a prolonged battle on these two fronts, they’re rapidly closing in on Trump on four other, more easily winnable fronts.

Various House committees are issuing friendly subpoenas to Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Mazars, and Capital One, giving them legal cover to turn over Donald Trump’s financial records – specifically with regard to Trump’s financial interactions with Russia. If the point of obtaining Trump’s tax returns is to follow the money and figure out why he’s so loyal to certain foreign enemies of the United States, then his banking and accounting records can go a long way toward exposing the same.

The big advantage for House Democrats is that, while Trump’s Treasury Department will illegally hold up the release of his tax returns as long as possible, these banks and financial institutions will gladly turn over Trump’s records so they can simply move on. After all, the likes of Capital One and JP Morgan don’t answer to Vladimir Putin; they answer to their shareholders and their own bottom line. The last thing they want is to be caught up in this Trump scandal any longer than necessary.

So even as House Democrats continue to gradually close in on Donald Trump on the two key fronts of the Mueller report and his tax returns, these other four fronts are far more quickly winnable for House Democrats. Keep in mind that this is just what all we know about. It wasn’t publicly revealed until last week that Capital One had been working with House Democrats since early March. How many more financial institutions may be selling Trump out as we speak?

New York Times, N.R.A. Sues Contractor Behind NRATV, Danny Hakim, April 16, 2019 (print ed.). It’s the N.R.A. versus NRATV. The National Rifle Association sued one of its largest and most enduring contractors late last week and raised concerns about the contractor’s relationship to the association’s own president, Oliver North (shown above in a screenshot), in a stunning breach within the normally buttoned-up organization.

The suit was filed late Friday by the N.R.A. in Virginia, where it is based, against Ackerman McQueen, the Oklahoma ad firm that operates NRATV, the group’s incendiary online media arm. The suit asserts that Ackerman has concealed details from the N.R.A. about how the company is spending the roughly $40 million that it and its affiliates receive annually from the association.

The suit creates uncertainty about Mr. North’s future at the organization. And it leaves the future of NRATV in doubt, given the new acrimony in the Ackerman relationship.

Since Ackerman created NRATV in 2016, it has often been “perceived by the public as the voice of the N.R.A.,” according to the rifle association’s complaint. It has also taken on an apocalyptic tone, warning of race wars, calling for a march on the Federal Bureau of Investigation and portraying the talking trains in the children’s show “Thomas & Friends” in Ku Klux Klan hoods.

The complaint details a peculiar standoff with Ackerman over Mr. North, who took over as president last year. The N.R.A. claims it was aware that Mr. North had a contract to act as the host of a web series for Ackerman, but that Ackerman has refused to provide a copy of the contract for nearly six months. Additionally, Mr. North’s counsel told the N.R.A. that “he could only disclose a copy of the contract” if Ackerman said he could, the suit says.

Subsequently, Ackerman allowed the N.R.A.’s general counsel to view the contract but not keep a copy; the viewing added to N.R.A. concerns that it had not previously received an accurate summary of the document. The association was also concerned that Mr. North’s relationship to Ackerman could “supersede his duties to the N.R.A.”

A standoff persists over additional details about the relationship, according to the complaint.

The suit culminates the fracturing of a more than three-decade relationship between Ackerman and the N.R.A., going back to the shaping of such memorable lines as Charlton Heston’s proclaiming that his gun would have to be pried “from my cold, dead hands.” Wayne LaPierre, the longtime chief executive of the N.R.A., had previously been a steadfast champion of the Ackerman relationship.

New York Times, Analysis: Goldman Says Trump Could Squeak a Win in 2020, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Michael J. de la Merced and Jamie Condliffe. Economists at Goldman Sachs wrote in a research note over the weekend that President Trump has a “narrow” advantage over his potential Democratic challenger next year, according to news reports.

• Prediction markets have suggested that a Democratic challenger is likely to win.

• But Bloomberg reported that the Goldman economists, Alec Phillips and Blake Taylor, argue that, “The advantage of first term incumbency and the relatively strong economic performance ahead of the presidential election suggest that President Trump is more likely to win a second term than the eventual Democratic candidate is to defeat him.”

• And polls that include Howard Schultz as a potential third-party candidate show him reducing the Democratic vote share by around 2 percentage points more than the Republican vote share. The Goldman economists acknowledged that Mr. Trump will face headwinds. Among them: “Groups that most strongly supported President Trump in 2016 made up a smaller share of total voters in 2018 than they did in 2014.”

President Trump escalated his attacks on a Muslim member of Congress and “Radical Left Democrats” on Monday ahead of a reelection campaign that is quickly taking shape around divisive messages centered on immigration and patriotism.

Speaking Monday at an event billed as a tax and economy roundtable, Trump told a suburban Minneapolis audience “how unfairly you’ve been treated as a state” when it comes to immigration, and he rattled off a litany of grudges against the current system: The loopholes are “horrible and foolish,” the visa lottery is “insane,” and the concept of asylum is “ridiculous.”

“People come in, they read a line from a lawyer that a lawyer hands them out online,” Trump said at the event as he mimicked an asylum seeker reading from a piece of paper. “It’s a big con job. That’s what it is.”

The far left’s frustration with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on the rise, as liberal advocates and lawmakers fume that she hasn’t done enough to defend freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (right) from attacks by President Trump and other Republicans and has undermined their policies and leaders, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Pelosi, eager to protect her newfound majority and looking ahead to the 2020 elections, has made it a point to put distance between her party and the policies espoused by some of her new, liberal members, including both women. Republicans have tried to use the liberal policy initiatives against all Democrats. Pelosi purposely has cast the proposals as aspirational, telling The Washington Post she was “agnostic” about Medicare-for-all compared with the 2010 Affordable Care Act, and calling Ocasio-Cortez’s environmental Green New Deal “the green dream.”

Pelosi’s allies say it’s all to protect the House majority, a rationale Pelosi cited while taking questions during a Monday appearance at the London School of Economics. Asked about her “60 Minutes” comments about Ocasio-Cortez, Pelosi called the New York liberal “wonderful” but argued that the 43 districts Democrats flipped in 2018 were “right down the middle.”

Hill.com, Poll: Roy Moore leading Alabama GOP field, Reid Wilson, April 16, 2019. Former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore (right) leads the field of potential Republicans vying for the chance to challenge Sen. Doug Jones (D, below at left)), a year and a half after Moore lost what was supposed to be an easy election in a deep-red state.

A new poll shows Moore leading a still-evolving field of Alabama Republicans competing for the nomination. He is the top choice of 27 percent of Alabama Republican voters, according to the Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy Inc. survey.

The state’s three Republican members of Congress finish well behind Moore: Rep. Mo Brooks would take 18 percent, Rep. Bradley Byrne clocks in at 13 percent and Rep. Gary Palmer would take 11 percent. So far, Byrne is the only Republican candidate among those tested to have formally entered the race.

Moore, who captured the Republican nomination in 2017 by appealing to the state’s most conservative evangelical voters, came undone amid multiple allegations that he harassed or pursued women who were in their teens when he was in his 30s.

Jones, a former U.S. attorney, won the December special election by 1.7 percentage points, or about 22,000 votes. He became the first Democrat in more than a generation — since Sen. Richard Shelby, who has since changed his party affiliation — to represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate.

Washington Post, Sanders campaign escalates fight with establishment Democrats in reprise of 2016 party rifts, Sean Sullivan and Michael Scherer, April 16, 2019 (print ed.). Sen. Bernie Sanders (shown in a Justice Integrity Project 2016 photo) and his team have leveled accusations against a leading Democratic think tank even as the Vermont independent seeks the party’s nomination for president. Campaign advisers to Bernie Sanders escalated their attacks on a major Democratic-leaning think tank Monday, accusing the group of using corporate donations to mount a “consistent effort to belittle or demean” the independent Vermont senator while seeking to “kneecap” populist support for policies such as Medicare-for-all.

The onslaught, coming as Sanders sits atop national 2020 polls of declared presidential candidates, was the clearest signal yet that he plans to reprise his role as a disruptive insurgent who will run against established Democratic Party institutions even as he seeks the party’s nomination.

“I think this time around he wanted to make sure that people understood that he wasn’t just going to be a punching bag,” said Sanders’s campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, in an interview at the Mohegan Sun Pocono, where Sanders addressed members of a nurses union. “He’s comfortable having the fight within the party or outside the party, in general. That’s Bernie Sanders.”

• Washington Post, Sanders and his wife earned $1.7 million in past two years, returns show• Washington Post, Sanders keeps distance from Omar, even as he defends her against accusations of anti-Semitism

On Friday, the boy and his mother were standing outside the Rain Forest Cafe at the Bloomington, Minn., mall along with friends when a stranger approached them, according to charging documents. Aranda came close to the group, and the boy’s mother asked if they were in his way and should move. Instead, authorities say, Aranda grabbed the child and threw him off the third-floor balcony, a nearly 40-foot fall to the ground below.

Employees at the Maryland Correctional Institution in Jessup sneaked in drugs, cellphones, tobacco and USB drives, which inmates would sell to others imprisoned at the medium-security facility, according to the indictment that was unsealed this week.

Corrections employees suspected in the smuggling ring hid contraband “in their hair, clothing, underwear and internally” to get past the prison’s security screening, the indictment said. The employees accused in the scheme then delivered the smuggled items to inmates at various locations throughout the facility, including at “stash” locations such as the prison library, the indictment states.

New York Times, Court Rejects 2 Years of Judge’s Decisions in Cole Tribunal, Carol Rosenberg, April 16, 2019. The destroyer Cole was attacked in October 2000, killing 17 American sailors and injuring dozens more. April 16, 2019This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday threw out more than two years of a military tribunal judge’s decisions in the case of the man accused of plotting the bombing of the destroyer Cole, finding that the jurist wrongly hid his pursuit of an immigration judge job while sitting on the war crimes case.

The decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was a major setback in the oldest death-penalty case at Guantánamo Bay, and yet another twist in a winding and fraught case that has come to symbolize the government’s difficulties in pursuing prosecutions of detainees through the military tribunal system.

April 15

Notre Dame Fire

BBC, Notre-Dame cathedral: Firefighters tackle blaze in Paris, Staff report, April 15, 2019. A major fire has engulfed much of one of France's most famous landmarks -- the medieval Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris (whose famed spire is shown ablaze above in a Sky News photo). Its spire has collapsed. The cause is not yet clear, but officials say that it could be linked to renovation work.

A major operation to tackle the blaze is under way at the 850-year-old Gothic building. Last year, the Catholic Church in France appealed for funds to save the building, which was crumbling.

A spokesman for the Paris fire department said the next hour and a half was "crucial" in order to determine whether the fire could be contained. Loud bangs could be heard as flames burst through the roof of the cathedral, also engulfing its left tower.

Thousands of people have gathered in the streets around the cathedral, observing the flames in silence. Some could be seen crying, while others sang hymns. French President Emmanuel Macron (shown at right in a file photo), who has arrived at the scene, said his thoughts were with "all Catholics and all French people."

"Like all of my countrymen, I am sad tonight to see this part of us burn." A spokesman for the cathedral said the whole structure was "burning".

"There will be nothing left," he said. "It remains to be seen whether the vault, which protects the cathedral, will be affected or not."

The blaze broke out on Monday afternoon and huge plumes of smoke could be seen wafting across the city. Historian Camille Pascal told French broadcaster BFMTV the fire was destroying "invaluable heritage."

The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, urged people to respect the boundaries set up by fire crews in order to ensure that they remain safe. "There are a lot of art works inside...it's a real tragedy," she told reporters.

The architect of President Trump’s immigration agenda, Mr. Miller (shown in a screenshot) was presiding last month over a meeting in the White House Situation Room when he demanded to know why the administration officials gathered there were taking so long to carry out his plans.

A regulation to deny welfare benefits to legal immigrants — a change Mr. Miller repeatedly predicted would be “transformative” — was still plodding through the approval process after more than two years, he complained. So were the new rules that would overturn court-ordered protections for migrant children. They were still not finished, he added, berating Ronald D. Vitiello, the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“You ought to be working on this regulation all day every day,” he shouted, as recounted by two participants at the meeting. “It should be the first thought you have when you wake up. And it should be the last thought you have before you go to bed. And sometimes you shouldn’t go to bed.”

A few weeks after that meeting, the consequences of Mr. Miller’s frustration and the president he was channeling have played out in striking fashion.

Mr. Trump has withdrawn Mr. Vitiello’s nomination to permanently lead ICE and pushed out Kirstjen Nielsen, his homeland security secretary. The department’s acting deputy secretary, Claire Grady, and the Secret Service director, Randolph D. Alles, are departing as well. And the White House has made it clear that others, including L. Francis Cissna, the head of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and John Mitnick, the department’s general counsel, are likely to go soon.

And behind that purge is Mr. Miller, the 33-year-old White House senior adviser. While immigration is the issue that has dominated Mr. Trump’s time in office, the president has little interest or understanding about how to turn his gut instincts into reality. So it is Mr. Miller, a fierce ideologue who was a congressional spokesman before joining the Trump campaign, who has shaped policy, infuriated civil liberties groups and provoked a bitter struggle within the administration.

Mueller Report

New York Times, Emboldened by His Attorney General, Trump Confronts Mueller Report Head-On, Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman, April 15, 2019 (print ed.). The case was closed for President Trump on March 24, the day Attorney General William P. Barr delivered to Congress his four-page summary of the special counsel’s 300-plus page report. “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter that day. And in the weeks that followed, the president’s message of vindication and revenge on his political antagonists has only intensified, as he has expressed no interest in reading the full report and leveled charges of treason against Democratic lawmakers.

Mr. Barr’s letter effectively emboldened Mr. Trump, aides said, even as they prepare for new details to emerge from a redacted version of the report — expected this week — that could renew questions about the president’s fitness for office, and even as some of them cringe at Mr. Trump’s choice of the word “exonerate.” (Privately, they admit, they would prefer he use the word “vindicate.”)

But Mr. Trump’s mood has been lighter since the report was filed, people close to him said, even though neither he nor his White House lawyers have seen the full document, or at this point plan to do so before it is released to Congress and to the public. People close to Mr. Trump said they have noticed an increase in his confidence after he spent months feeling weighed down by a loss of control.

Media: Assange Arrest

CaitlinJohnstone.com, Opinion: The US Government Won’t Care About Your Definition Of Journalism After The Assange Precedent Is Set, Caitlin Johnstone, April 15, 2019. Since I published my last article about about the idiotic “Assange isn’t a journalist” smear, this talking point has become more and more commonplace in online discourse. It’s very important to defenders of the political status quo for us all to believe that Assange is not a journalist, because otherwise that would mean they’re cheering for a dangerous precedent which would allow for the prosecution of journalists who exposed the truth about US government malfeasance. And that would mean cognitive dissonance, which all defenders of the political status quo spend most of their day-to-day mental energy running away from.

All of these definitions ultimately boil down to the argument that because Assange doesn’t publish leaks in a way that they feel journalism ought to be practiced, it isn’t journalism and therefore sets no legal precedent for journalists around the world. As though the US government is going to be consulting their feelings about what specifically constitutes journalism the next time they decide to imprison a journalist for doing what Assange did.

It doesn’t work that way, sugar tits. Assange is being prosecuted by the Trump administration for standard journalistic practices, he stands no chance of receiving a fair trial, and it is very likely that he will be hit with far more serious charges for his activities once on US soil. The next time the US government, under Trump or someone else, sees another journalist anywhere in the world doing something similar to what Assange did, there will be nothing stopping them from saying, “We need to lock that person up like we did Assange; they’re doing the same sort of thing.”

It’s just so amazingly arrogant how people imagine that the way their feelings feel will factor into this in any way. You won’t get to define how the US government will interpret what constitutes journalism in the future. Only the US government will. It’s amazing that this isn’t more obvious to more people.

In reality, journalism has always been and will always be defined as an activity. It’s not like being a doctor. If you happen to witness a car crash and you give CPR on the scene, you are not a doctor in that moment, but if you take some photos and post them online with a summary of what you saw then you are engaging in the act of journalism and all the legalities and rules of journalism apply to you.

The particular journalistic activities that the US is currently trying to extradite Assange for is encouraging a source to give him more documents and conspiracy to help Manning hide her identity so that she would not be persecuted for her heroic act of whistleblowing. In other words, Assange was attempting to make sure Manning’s leaks had enough impact to justify the risk, and also to try and make sure she wasn’t caught and tortured for it.

Every day, in 60 courts throughout the country, roughly 400 immigration judges sit to decide the fates of thousands of people. Our courtrooms can be almost anywhere: in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities, in federal courthouses or in leased commercial office spaces — like mine in the heart of the financial district in San Francisco. Walking by, you wouldn’t know what is going on inside.

What occurs in immigration courts is probably the most mysterious of all legal processes in our country. The reason: These are administrative courts, part of the Justice Department rather than the judicial branch. The rules we operate under are written by political appointees, not by judges, and often favor the government.

Our courts’ decisions are life-changing. We rule on whether a person is a U.S. citizen, whether a noncitizen can qualify for a status that allows him or her to remain in this country, or whether a person has violated our laws and must be forced to leave. Our decisions may cause the separation of parents and children or husbands and wives, because the law gives judges no discretion to allow someone to remain in our country based solely on hardship or humanitarian reasons.

And, at times, the decisions can amount to a death sentence, such as when we deny an application for asylum because the law does not protect all those who find themselves in harm’s way back home.

The volume of work can be overwhelming. Some of our judges carry caseloads of 5,000 cases or more, usually with limited support staff. Because we work for the Justice Department, we are directed how to arrange our dockets and micromanaged about how much time we spend on cases. Beginning in October of last year, judges were ordered to complete 700 cases each year or risk a less-than-satisfactory performance evaluation, which can cost a judge his or her job. This is not how a court should be run. Attorney General William P. Barr told Congress this week that he is hoping to boost the number of judges in our courtrooms from around 425 to 535 over the next few years and for a commensurate boost in lawyers and clerks. We desperately need the help.

Trump Watch

Washington Post, Opinion: For Trump, the name of the season is treason, Dana Milbank (right), April 14, 2019 (print ed.). In the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon, President Trump gave a lesson on American justice to the visiting South Korean president. Speaking about the Mueller investigation and its origins, Trump said: “This is actually treason.”

This wasn’t offhand. On Wednesday, Trump tweeted that the probe was a “Treasonous Hoax” and that “what the Democrats are doing with the Border is TREASONOUS.” That same day, boarding Marine One, he reaffirmed that what Democrats and Justice Department officials did in the Mueller probe “was treason.”

Trump has publicly invoked “treason” or “treasonous” on 26 occasions, according to the Factba.se compilation of Trump utterances. That’s in addition to various and sundry “traitor” references. He began by accusing the likes of Bowe Bergdahl, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, then moved on to include the executives of Univision and Macy’s, Republicans who didn’t support him, Democratic lawmakers who didn’t applaud him, the failing New York Times, the media generally, people in his administration who leak, and Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Eric Holder, Loretta E. Lynch, Huma Abedin, James B. Comey, James R. Clapper Jr., Rod J. Rosenstein, Robert S. Mueller III, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok.

The Constitution specifically says treason “shall consist only in levying war against” the United States “or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort,” and it requires two witnesses. The U.S. Criminal Code requires that those guilty of treason “shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years.”

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump is having his most whacked out weekend yet, and he just gave something away in the process, Bill Palmer, April 14, 2019. Like every bad poker player, Donald Trump has a tell, and he’s completely unwilling or unable to hide it. When he starts ranting and raving on Twitter at all hours of the day and night, as opposed to just his usual early morning meltdowns, it means he thinks (or knows) that something rather ugly for him about to surface. This weekend has been one of Trump’s most whacked rant-fests to date – and somewhere in there, he gave away something specific.

Donald Trump tends to do less tweeting on Saturday than any other day. But yesterday he couldn’t stop tweeting. He started the day with a loveletter to murderous dictator Kim Jong Un, and then he went on to attack everyone from Hillary Clinton, to the FBI, to Congress, to immigrants, to the New York Times, to the Mayor of Oakland.

Trump’s ranting couldn’t have been any more maniacal. At one point he stated that the New York Times will be out of business within six years, before making up a phony story about how the newspaper apologized to him for the negative coverage it gave him during the 2016 election. At another point he characterized immigrants as being “Gang Members, Drug Dealers, Human Traffickers, and Criminals of all shapes, sizes and kinds.” But really, we think that description is more befitting of his own cabinet. (At right, illustration from 2016 campaign.)

New York Times, Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, April 14, 2019. The tech giant records people’s locations worldwide. Now, investigators are using it to find suspects and witnesses near crimes, running the risk of snaring the innocent.

When detectives in a Phoenix suburb arrested a warehouse worker in a murder investigation last December, they credited a new technique with breaking open the case after other leads went cold.

The police told the suspect, Jorge Molina, they had data tracking his phone to the site where a man was shot nine months earlier. They had made the discovery after obtaining a search warrant that required Google to provide information on all devices it recorded near the killing, potentially capturing the whereabouts of anyone in the area.

But after he spent nearly a week in jail, the case against Mr. Molina fell apart as investigators learned new information and released him. Last month, the police arrested another man: his mother’s ex-boyfriend, who had sometimes used Mr. Molina’s car.

The warrants, which draw on an enormous Google database employees call Sensorvault, turn the business of tracking cellphone users’ locations into a digital dragnet for law enforcement. In an era of ubiquitous data gathering by tech companies, it is just the latest example of how personal information — where you go, who your friends are, what you read, eat and watch, and when you do it — is being used for purposes many people never expected. As privacy concerns have mounted among consumers, policymakers and regulators, tech companies have come under intensifying scrutiny over their data collection practices.

The Arizona case demonstrates the promise and perils of the new investigative technique, whose use has risen sharply in the past six months, according to Google employees familiar with the requests. It can help solve crimes. But it can also snare innocent people.

Global Elections: India

New York Times, What It Takes to Pull Off India’s Gargantuan Election, Russell Goldman, April 14, 2019. More than 900 million people — over 10 percent of the world’s population — could head to the polls over several weeks. The process requires 12 million polling officials, cutting-edge technology, and in some cases, trains, planes and elephants.

Middle Eastern / Arab News

Axios Sneak Peak, 3. Inside the room: King of Jordan in the dark on Trump's peace plan, Jonathan Swan, April 14, 2019. In a closed-door meeting with members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month, King Abdullah II of Jordan said the White House had given him zero visibility into the most fraught part of their peace plan: how it proposes to divide Israeli and Palestinian territory.

• The king seemed dissatisfied with the level of consultation and was pessimistic about the plan's prospects, two sources in the room told me and Alayna Treene.• And my colleague Barak Ravid reports that King Abdullah has privately told people he is frustrated by the fact that despite having numerous meetings with senior Trump administration officials, he's never been given any detail about the core political issues, in which Jordan has a huge interest.

Behind the scenes: Sources with direct knowledge tell Axios that only five or six people in the entire U.S. government have seen the political side of the plan, making it one of few secrets the White House has been able to keep.

Why it matters: The White House's Arab partners who will need to sell a peace deal remain in the dark about its political dimensions.

• These Arab partners — including the Saudis and Emiratis — have also complained that the Trump administration has taken steps favoring the Israelis and frustrating the Arab world, including moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

What's next: The White House peace plan isn't expected to be public before mid-June, and it's unclear if the White House will reveal the whole thing at once. Some on the team, according to sources in touch with them, hope to roll out the economic side first.

The aim of the project was to provide Iraq and Iran with access to Syrian ports. Before the outbreak of the war in 2011, Syria had completed 97% of the project, but large portions of the railway system were destroyed during the clashes.

Al Watan also reported that there were understandings with the Chinese side to be a partner in this project, which will be parallel to the Belt and Road Initiative, which is planned to be completed for the benefit of several countries, including Syria, Iraq, Iran, China, Pakistan among others.

The country told the US and other participants in the Middle East Security Alliance, or MESA ahead of a meeting on April 7th in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. One of the anonymous sources said Cairo did not send a delegation to the meeting, the latest gathering held to advance the U.S.-led effort to bind Sunni Muslim Arab allies into a security, political and economic pact to counter Shi’ite Iran.

The reasons behind the decision, according to the sources, is that Egypt doesn’t wish to harm its relations with Iran, as well as it doesn’t believe that US President Donald Trump would be elected for a second term. If Trump is gone that jeopardizes the entire “Arab NATO” idea since the next POTUS may decide not to follow through.

9/11 Litigation Fund-Raising Update

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, FBI Lawsuit Fund Drive: $55,000 Raised, $5,000 to Go! Staff report, April 14, 2019. Lawsuit Seeks Answers on Five Men Arrested on 9/11 With two days left to go in the fundraising drive for our historic FBI Lawsuit, we are just $5,000 shy of raising the funds needed to cover the early phases of litigation. We are so grateful to those who’ve made this bold legal action possible by donating.

If you haven’t chipped in yet and you believe in this effort to force the FBI to report all of the evidence detailed in our 44-page complaint, please help us reach our goal by this Monday, April 15. Your gift will ensure that we and the Lawyers' Committee for 9/11 Inquiry have all the resources required to litigate this case.

Today, we wanted to share more about the second count that AE911Truth has joined in the lawsuit, which calls for the FBI to assess and report the evidence it gathered regarding the five men who were seen celebrating the World Trade Center attacks and arrested later that day. You can learn more about this count and read the full text of it in our just-published article “Lawsuit Seeks Answers on Five Men Arrested on 9/11."

Indeed, the moral debate surrounding political assassination seems murkier and more open-ended now than ever.

Two years ago, President Donald Trump appeared unperturbed during a national television interview with then Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly when asked about doing business with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. In 2006, Putin approved a law allowing assassinations abroad, making them almost commonplace in nearby Ukraine.

"Putin's a killer," said O'Reilly.

"There's a lot of killers, we got a lot of killers," President Trump replied. "What, you think our country is so innocent?"

O'Reilly seemed taken aback. Trump persisted. "You think our country is so innocent?" the president repeated.

History shows America's first (known) attempt at state-sanctioned assassination began in the early 1960s when the CIA recruited two top gangsters, Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, to try to kill Cuba's young Communist leader Fidel Castro. The Mafia was enraged because Castro closed down their lucrative Havana casinos. And US officials worried about Castro spreading revolution throughout Latin America, becoming a puppet who obtained Russian missiles and nearly provoked an Armageddon-like nuclear war.

April 13

Federal Judge Blasts Trump

U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves argued for federal courts’ need to defend marginalized groups at a University of Virginia School of Law event on April 11. (University of Virginia School of Law)

Washington Post, You can hear the Klan’s lawyers’: Federal judge likens Trump’s attacks on judiciary to KKK, Reis Thebault, April 13, 2019. Federal judge compares Trump’s attacks on judiciary to KKK, segregationist attacks on black judges. President Trump has attacked the judiciary like few U.S. leaders before him, disparaging judges and their rulings as “dangerous,” “horrible” and “a complete and total disgrace.” Some of his supporters and fellow Republicans applaud and parrot him, but U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves said he hears something sinister: echoes of a time when the Ku Klux Klan and the architects of the Jim Crow South attacked the courts for chipping away at segregation and racism.

In a speech to the University of Virginia School of Law on Thursday, Reeves criticized Trump’s aggressive responses to his administration’s losses in court and the lack of diversity in his judicial appointments — an extremely rare rebuke from a sitting federal judge. Though Reeves, whose court is in Jackson, Miss., never mentioned Trump by name, he quoted the president more than a dozen times and compared him to a stridently racist Alabama governor.

“When the executive branch calls our courts and their work ‘stupid,’ ‘horrible,’ ‘ridiculous,’ ‘incompetent,’ ‘a laughingstock,’” Reeves said, drawing from Trump’s Twitter feed, “you can hear the slurs and threats of executives like George Wallace, echoing into the present.”

Take Trump’s insults of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, Reeves said. Trump said Curiel should not hear a lawsuit against Trump University because Trump’s hard-line immigration polices presented a conflict of interest for Curiel, who is of Mexican descent.

“I know what I heard when a federal judge was called ‘very biased and unfair’ because he is ‘of Mexican heritage.’ When that judge’s ethnicity was said to prevent his issuing ‘fair rulings,' when that judge was called a 'hater’ simply because he is Latino,” Reeves said, “I heard those words and I did not know if it was 1967 or 2017.”

The White House declined to comment on the speech, which was first reported by BuzzFeed News. Reeves, through his law clerk, said he wouldn’t make any further comments.

Half a century later, Reeves said, Americans are “eyewitnesses to the third great assault on our judiciary.”

“When politicians attack courts as ‘dangerous,’ ‘political,’ and guilty of ‘egregious overreach,’ you can hear the Klan’s lawyers, assailing officers of the court across the South,” he said.

It’s not that courts should be exempt from criticism, Reeves (shown in a file photo) said. He maintained that debating judicial decisions ultimately improves the courts.

“But the slander and falsehoods thrown at courts today are not those of a critic seeking to improve the judiciary’s search for truth,” he said. “They are words of an attacker, seeking to distort and twist that search toward falsehood.”

Trump’s broadsides may be loud, but it’s his appointments that may end up having the most lasting effect, Reeves said. As of April 1, more than three-quarters of confirmed appellate and district court nominees were white, according to Alliance for Justice, a left-leaning advocacy group. More than 90 percent were male.

“That’s not what America looks like,” Reeves said. “That’s not even what the legal profession looks like. . . . There is no excuse for this exclusion of minority experiences from our courts.”

When Trump was a candidate, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told the New York Times that she “can’t imagine what this place would be . . . with Donald Trump as our president.”

“For the country, it could be four years,” she said. “For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that.”

Days later, Ginsburg apologized, calling her comments “ill-advised.”

Reeves, however, has drawn national attention before. In 2018, he issued a strongly worded decision striking down Mississippi’s law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, chastising the state for choosing to “pass a law it knew was unconstitutional.”

In 2015, Reeves gave another stirring speech, that time a 2,500-word address from the bench, aimed at three white men who were sentenced in the killing of a black man — a hate crime, he said, that in the past would have been written off as “acceptable racially inspired pranks.” Instead he handed down sentences between seven and 50 years.

Reeves gave his speech Thursday as he accepted the university’s Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law, one of its highest awards. He began by addressing the third U.S. president’s complicated history — a mix of “genius,” “curiosity” and “industry,” along with well-documented racism.

“I must stand up and speak about that pairing,” he said. “How corrosive it has been since the days of Jefferson, who we all agree, was a man of his time. How often that pairing has been embraced throughout our history, by men of their times. And why we must defend against its poison when spewed today, by men of our time.”

Trump Watch

Washington Post, House Democrats give IRS until April 23 to turn over Trump tax returns, Jeff Stein​, April 13, 2019. Legal experts have suggested an outright denial of their request by Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin could be followed by subpoenas or a lawsuit in federal court. House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.) on Saturday sent a two-page letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig rebuffing Mnuchin’s statement earlier this week that Treasury would miss House Democrats’ initial April 10 deadline for the returns.

Mnuchin’s concerns “lack merit,” Neal wrote.

Palmer Report, Opinion: House Democrats hand Donald Trump his ten day notice, Bill Palmer, April 13, 2019. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal has now given the Treasury Department a hard deadline of April 23rd to turn over Donald Trump’s tax returns. It has to be done this way because, assuming Mnuchin and the gang continue to illegally refuse this request, it’ll result in a subpoena battle in court. House Democrats have to convince the judge that they tried every reasonable measure possible to resolve the matter before resorting to a subpoena.

So now we know that ten days from now, assuming Trump’s Treasury Department continues to refuse to follow the law, House Democrats will pursue this as a legal matter. As David Cay Johnston recently spelled out, Steve Mnuchin and others can end up going to jail for refusing to comply with the law on this matter. Are they willing to go that far to try to protect Trump, or will one of them cave first? We’re ten days away from getting some answers.

A top House investigative committee plans to subpoena President Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, for Trump’s financial statements on Monday, according to a memo to committee members obtained by The Washington Post.

House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (right) on Friday notified panel members of his intention to subpoena the company after it refused to hand over Trump’s financial documents, citing laws and rules that require compulsory measures from the panel.

New York Times, Trump Assails Omar With Video of Sept. 11 Attacks, Maggie Haberman, April 13, 2019. President President Trump on Friday targeted Representative Ilhan Omar for remarks she made during a speech on civil rights and Muslims in America with a graphic video featuring the burning World Trade Center towers and other images from Sept. 11, 2001, that he tweeted to millions of his followers.

The Twitter post from the president stoked and amplified a controversy that has been a focus of conservative news outlets, which have sought to elevate Ms. Omar (right) — a Minnesota Democrat and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress — as a political target, as Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign begins in earnest.

At issue were remarks that Ms. Omar made last month at an event hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. There, she gave a speech in which she addressed lingering fear directed at Muslims, and the rights Muslims have to speak out about being viewed with suspicion.

During the speech, she said that Muslims had “lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it.” She added that the council was created after the Sept. 11 attacks “because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” (The Council on American-Islamic Relations was actually founded in 1994.)

Prosecution Against WikiLeaks' Assange

New York Times, As Ecuador Harbored Assange, It Was Subjected to Threats and Leaks, Nicholas Casey and Jo Becker, April 13, 2019 (print ed.). Ecuador protected the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (shown in a file photo) even as he threatened to leak damaging information about its government. But when private material of President Lenín Moreno was published, the embassy opened its doors to the police.

A coalition of campaigners representing survivors of sexual violence urged the home secretary to focus on the unresolved rape allegations emanating from Sweden against Assange. They fear that US charges – relating to WikiLeaks’ disclosures – may be given priority in the UK.

The United States has filed a provisional extradition request for Assange while Sweden continues to weigh up whether to reopen an investigation into rape and sexual assault allegations against the 47-year-old co-founder of WikiLeaks. On occasions, when there are competing extradition requests, the home secretary decides which country should take priority.

Sarah Green, co-director of End Violence Against Women, an alliance of more than 80 organisations, said Assange’s portrayal by some as a victim was an affront to rape survivors.

“He’s always benefited from his cult hero status, painting himself as a victim and being very righteous. Yet this is about rape, it’s what he is accused of. It’s extremely serious.”

Green added that there was widespread disquiet that the rape allegations were being smothered by the broader debate on Assange, who is being held in London’s Belmarsh prison after his arrest on Thursday. He had spent the previous seven years in Ecuador’s London embassy.

It was the sort of comment designed to deflect, with irony or humour, the stories that have swirled around the woman who has levelled three charges of sexual misconduct at Assange.

But her attempt to disarm her critics - referring, perhaps jokingly, to the Central Intelligence Agency - has only provoked further questions. Could Ardin, 31, really be a spy and the charges against Assange part of a conspiracy to discredit him after he began publishing on WikiLeaks 250,000 classified documents from the US State Department? We know from Ardin's own words that, at various times, she has been infatuated and infuriated with Assange.

According to a timeline compiled by Australian journalist Guy Rundle in London, the day after Ardin's mid-August assignation with Assange - the assignation she later said involved rape - she tweeted that she wanted to take him to a ''crayfish party'', a popular summer social activity in Sweden.

Another tweet has her being with ''the world's coolest, smartest people, it's amazing!''

At the same time as Assange was enjoying her company, he became involved with another Swedish woman, Sofia Wilen, 26, a photographer whom he met at a public meeting he addressed and Ardin organised.

When Ardin learnt of Assange's encounter with Wilen - after Wilen approached her worried she may have become pregnant after unprotected sex - both women complained to the Swedish police.

Ardin alleged three counts of misconduct, while Wilen laid one charge.

The Swedish laws define rape broadly, so that pressing an erect penis against a woman's back the morning after consensual sex and not wearing a condom can count as sexual offences.

Nevertheless, any charge of rape is serious.

Australian journalist and expert on espionage Philip Knightley, who is backing Assange in his battle with the British courts, does not believe Ardin is a CIA agent.

''There's no direct evidence,'' he told The Sun-Herald. But he said that decades of dealing with spy agencies had led him to suspect that she fitted the model of someone who could be useful to intelligence agencies.

''She's someone they would consider an asset. I do not think she has been recruited for this mission but once she realised she was in this position, she might have known the right people to contact.''

The essence of Knightley's theory is that Ardin is someone whose high-level political activity inside Sweden's historically dominant party - and her ability to travel to contentious destinations such as Cuba and make connections with hostile emigre communities as part of her academic research - would make her a valuable source for Sweden's boutique spy agency.

The theory that Ardin may be an active spy - or even just a naive participant in a conspiracy involving a Swedish intelligence agency trying to get close to its American counterpart - could obscure a more simple proposition: that she is a spurned lover who has seized the chance to go after a man who has made himself the No.1 enemy of the US.

In January this year, well before WikiLeaks began dumping US diplomatic cables on the web and long before she had ever met Assange, she published a manual on how to ''systematically take revenge'' on ''someone who cheated or who dumped you.'

She wrote: ''Do a brainstorm of appropriate measures for the category of revenge you're after … You can sabotage your victim's current relationship, such as getting his new partner to be unfaithful or ensure that he gets a madman after him.''

Assange may not be the prey of a ''madman,' such as an aggrieved husband or boyfriend, but the WikiLeaks founder is certainly the target of an angry superpower.

Roger Stone Case

Washington Post, Roger Stone asks for full copy of Mueller report and to have his indictment dismissed, Spencer S. Hsu, April 13, 2019. Roger Stone’s defense fired a volley of legal attacks at special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation Friday, asking a federal judge to dismiss Stone’s indictment for lying to Congress and obstructing justice and to order that Stone receive a full unredacted copy of Mueller’s recently completed report.

“No other person, Committee, or entity has Stone’s constitutionally based standing to demand the complete, unredacted Report,” Stone’s attorneys argued on behalf of the longtime confidant of President Trump. Only then “can he determine whether the Report contains material which could be critical to his defense,” or if he was selectively prosecuted, they wrote in a series of motions.

Stone, 66 (shown in a screenshot), has pleaded not guilty to charges that he lied about his efforts to gather information about Democratic Party emails hacked by Russian operatives during the 2016 presidential campaign and released through the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks and others.

The Roger Stone indictment is the most substantial filling in the Russia probe to date. It’s also peppered with movie references, mafia lingo and a dog.

Stone’s filing came one day after WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, was expelled from the Ecuadoran Embassy in London and arrested on an unsealed, year-old U.S. charges of conspiring to hack into a Pentagon computer network before his organization in 2010 published online a historic trove of classified U.S. documents.

Attorneys for Stone asked a judge Friday to toss out a seven-count indictment in which Mueller prosecutors alleged Stone was in frequent contact with members of Trump’s campaign about the WikiLeaks effort to release materials damaging to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton before the 2016 election.

A focus of the Mueller probe of Stone, court filings show, was whether he coordinated with Assange or WikiLeaks as it published thousands of Democratic emails that prosecutors say were hacked by Russian operatives. Barr said last month in a brief summary of Mueller’s report that the special counsel reported that its investigation did not establish that Trump campaign members “conspired or coordinated” with the Russian government’s interference activities

Instead, the 28-year-old from Texas had signed a plea agreement with federal prosecutors this month that cast him as a minor player in a sprawling $360 million Ponzi scheme that bilked hundreds of investors in Maryland and Virginia. Prosecutors said it was dreamed up by his employers. When Jezierski walked out of court, he would be an admitted felon for life.

At the courthouse, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joyce McDonald described a scheme led by two others — Kevin Merrill of Towson, Md., and Jay Ledford of Texas — in promoting “investor confidence that they could entrust their funds to what was really a criminal enterprise.”

Over two and a half hours, the driver pressed F5 — the button that records fare evaders — at least 50 times, and there was still a half-hour left on his morning route.

“It’s getting worse,” said the driver, Luis, who declined to provide his full name because he did not have permission to discuss his job. “How many? On my bus, hundreds a day. Hundreds with an ‘s.’”

Transit officials recently announced a remarkable figure: One in five bus riders in New York City does not pay the fare. The statistic stunned even Andy Byford, the leader of the subway and bus system, who said it was “wholly unacceptable” and at least double the rate of other cities across the world.

Cities across the world are grappling with fare evasion, though it is far worse in New York. In Paris, the fare evasion rate for buses is 11 percent, while in Toronto it is 5 percent, according to the local transit agencies. The Paris transit system has 1,200 staff members dedicated to the problem and hands out about one million fines each year.

There is no discernible mass groundswell for an Eric Swalwell presidential campaign.

The case against: He is a 38-year-old California congressman of little legislative distinction. He would appear to have minimal running room in a deep and accomplished Democratic field expected to grow to 20 or so — large enough to fill two baseball starting lineups, with another contender or two left to heckle from the dugout.

The case for: Why not?

“We don’t have time for vanity things,” Mr. Swalwell (shown at right) insisted in an interview this past week, the morning after he announced his candidacy on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” pledging to anchor his bid in a call for greater gun control. “We’re doing big things.”

That remains to be seen. But at the very least, if recent history is a guide, a run is likely to yield better things, perpetuating the victory-in-defeat incentive structure endemic to modern presidential politics.

Washington Post, Health-care law more popular despite Trump’s and GOP’s repeated attempts to destroy it, Paige Winfield Cunningham​, April 13, 2019. Since its passage in 2010, 25 million more Americans are insured, with millions more getting coverage that is more comprehensive because of it. Even some Republicans who won elections vowing to "repeal and replace" now speak favorably of President Obama’s signature domestic achievement.

Media / Technology

White House Chronicle, Opinion: Information Technology and Democracy — a Light That Failed, Llewellyn King (shown above), April 12, 2019. When the age of communication started (pick your time, but I think it was when we started sending print by telephone in the form of a fax), it was thought that dictators would fall, and democracy would be reinvigorated.

The first big disappointment was Saudi Arabia. When the Saudis began to get uncensored news and information, it was believed that the grip of the royal family and its extreme religious allies would be loosened. It did not happen. Instead, Saudi Arabia was spurred to use its oil wealth to push conservative Islam around the globe, especially in places where it was present but could be radicalized, including Pakistan and Bangladesh. They poured their money into madrassas — religious schools — that preached the Wahhabism, a strict and puritanical interpretation of Sunni Islam.

People ask me why, when the mainstream media daily points up President Donald Trump’s failures and transgressions, his supporters are unmoved, disdaining what is being revealed in favor of what they want to believe. They believe in Trump and they believe in his courtiers at Fox News Channel and on talk radio.

People do not react to raw information but, rather, to information that sits well with them for other reasons: what they are predisposed to believe.

Rupert Murdoch, the boss of Fox News, has had a genius, a real genius, for corralling those who felt ignored by society. He did it in Britain with his hugely successful tabloid newspaper, The Sun, and he has done it here with Fox News. In Britain and in the United States, he found and exploited a nativism that both countries had forgotten they had.

Fox News did not invent Trump; instead, the shoe fit.

How we react to the news depends on our involvement with it in tertiary ways. If you were already convinced of British exceptionalism, you would move toward the hostility to Europe expressed in The Sun. If you think immigrants take jobs, speak strange languages and are usurping our Americanism, you will be gung-ho for Trump’s southern border wall.

In the 1990s you could find, and I did, from Nicaragua to Zimbabwe, old-line communists lamenting the fall of the Soviet Union. They argued that it had not been given a chance. These people really believed that all that was wanted was more of what did not work.

If you are a Trump supporter, you are genuinely amazed that the mainstream media cannot see that what he is doing is great. Democrats and renegade Republicans, like columnist George Will, can find nothing, absolutely nothing, good in the Trump presidency.

People, including AOL founder Steve Case, talked idealistically about the internet in the days when it was getting going as the great, new democratic tool; a boon to global democracy. Wrong. If anything, it stirred up a destructive nationalism.

Information, I have noticed as a journalist who has worked on three continents, does not necessarily shape political opinion.

Political opinion tends to find the media that agree with it, not the other way. But after the two have mated, media can inflame its public partner. Good for two-party rivalry, but not for elucidation.

Venezuelan Update

Washington Post, Venezuela’s military, despite U.S. expectations, has not turned on Maduro, Karen DeYoung and Mary Beth Sheridan, April 13, 2019. Underpaid, underfed and humiliated by the autocratic turn their country had taken, the armed forces were the linchpin of the Trump administration’s strategy to get the ruling government to step aside. Some U.S. officials predicted they would flip en masse within days. That hasn’t happened.

The Washington, DC-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) hosted a private roundtable on April 10 called “Assessing the Use of Military Force in Venezuela.” A list of attendees was provided to The Grayzone and two participants confirmed the meeting took place. They refused to offer any further detail, however.

Among the roughly 40 figures invited to the off-the-record event to discuss potential US military action against Caracas were some of the most influential advisors on President Donald Trump’s Venezuela policy. They included current and former State Department, National Intelligence Council, and National Security Council officials, along with Admiral Kurt Tidd, who was until recently the commander of US SOUTHCOM.

Senior officials from the Colombian and Brazilian embassies like Colombian General Juan Pablo Amaya, as well as top DC representatives from Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaido’s shadow government, also participated in the meeting.

On January 23, following backroom maneuvers, the United States openly initiated a coup attempt against Venezuela’s elected government by recognizing National Assembly president Juan Guaido as the country’s “interim president.”

Since then, Venezuela has endured a series of provocations and the steady escalation of punishing economic sanctions. President Nicolas Maduro has accused the US of attacks on the Simon Bolivar hydroelectric plant at the Guri dam, which have led to country-wide blackouts openly celebrated by top Trump officials.

In a March 5 call with Russian pranksters posing as the president of the Swiss Federation, US special envoy for Venezuela Elliot Abrams ruled out military action against Venezuela, revealing that he had only held out the threat to “make the Venezuelan military nervous.”

Since then, however, Guaido has failed to mobilize the national protest wave the Trump administration had anticipated, and the Venezuelan military has demonstrated unwavering loyalty to Maduro. In Washington, the sense of urgency has risen with each passing day.

Unz Review, Opinion: The Israeli Elections Came to Naught, Israel Shamir, April 13, 2019. Do not regret the results of Israeli elections. They were a non-event. Practically nothing has changed. Indeed many actors had hoped for change, but those hopes had no grounding in reality.

Israel is doing well, even exceedingly well. The country prospers. Despite high taxes, Israeli highways are crowded with new cars; Israeli housewives load their supermarket wagons with food for the Passover as if they prepare to die of overeating. The Israeli shekel is high like cotton in the summer, and all planes are full to the brim with Israeli vacationers. The weather has been playing for the incumbent [Benjamin Netanyahu, shown at right] as well: glorious Palestinian spring had brought out myriads of flowers and the blossom stays over the Holy Land.

In such a situation, people do not vote for change. And anyway, no real change had been offered. The new party of generals, called Blue-and-White, after the colours of Israeli national flag (it’s like calling an American party “Stars and Stripes”, or a British party, “Union Jack”), did not propose anything new. They said they would do the same, only better (or worse, for the Palestinians). The old opposition parties of the Left Zionists, Labour and Meretz, have lost their voters: they migrated to the generals. They anyway had nothing to offer, except more gender disorder and identity politics.

Israelis would be ungrateful if they’d vote against the incumbent, and they knew what was good for them. The generals, and other opponents of Bibi, tried to make something of Netanyahu’s coming indictment for corruption; but the general public was not impressed. Apparently, these charges had been used too much and too often to derail a political enemy, and people stopped paying heed.

April 12

U.S. Immigration News

New York Times, White House Considered Releasing Migrants in ‘Sanctuary Cities,’ Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, April 12, 2019 (print ed.). Migrants would have been sent to select cities represented by Democratic lawmakers, according to people familiar with the proposal. Proponents said the plan would send a message to politicians who didn’t support the president’s immigration policies.

After Bernie Sanders lost his primary campaign for president against Hillary Clinton in 2016, a Twitter account called Red Louisiana News reached out to his supporters to help sway the general election. “Conscious Bernie Sanders supporters already moving towards the best candidate Trump! #Feel the Bern #Vote Trump 2016,” the account tweeted.

The tweet was not actually from Louisiana, according to an analysis by Clemson University researchers. Instead, it was one of thousands of accounts identified as based in Russia, part of a cloaked effort to persuade supporters of the Vermont senator to elect Trump. “Bernie Sanders says his message resonates with Republicans,” said another Russian tweet.

W. Samuel Patten, 47 (shown in a file photo), in August admitted steering $50,000 from a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician to Trump’s committee in an investigation spun off from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Patten acknowledged he was helped by a Russian national who is a longtime associate of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and the case was referred to prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington and the Justice Department’s national security division.

In sparing Patten from prison, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson (right) accepted prosecutors’ request for leniency and noted no federal sentencing guideline directly applies to his offense of failing to register as a foreign lobbyist, which is punishable by up to five years in prison. Patten’s defense sought probation citing the substantial assistance he provided in several ongoing, undisclosed investigations.

He was sentenced to three years of probation. 500 hours of community service and fined $5,000. Patten’s offenses were “not a technicality, and not an oversight,” Jackson said in court, but serious offenses calculated to influence public policy and opinion in the United States for a foreign government “without telling the American people that it was those very Ukrainians paying you to do the talking.”

Patten “earned the trust of the government and became a reliable and valuable resource” for Mueller’s Russia investigation and prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office, Patten’s attorney Stuart A. Sears said in sentencing papers.

U.S. Stonewalling Thwarts War Crime Prosecution

International Criminal Court (ICC), ICC judges reject opening of an investigation regarding Afghanistan situation, Staff report, April 12, 2019. Today, Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court (ICC) rejected unanimously the request of the Prosecutor to proceed with an investigation for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, on the territory of in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The judges decided that an investigation into the situation in Afghanistan at this stage would not serve the interests of justice. The Chamber is composed of Judge Antoine Kesia-Mbe Mindua, who will be appending a concurring separate opinion, Judge Tomoko Akane and Judge Rosario Salvatore Aitala.

On 20 November 2017, the Prosecutor had requested authorisation from Pre-Trial Judges to initiate an investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in relation to the armed conflict in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan since 1 May 2003, as well as regarding similar crimes related to the armed conflict in Afghanistan allegedly committed in the territory of other States Parties to the Rome Statute since 1 July 2002.

The Chamber thoroughly checked the information submitted by the Prosecutor and considered that the request establishes a reasonable basis to consider that crimes within the ICC jurisdiction have been committed in Afghanistan and that potential cases would be admissible before the Court. However, the Chamber noted the time elapsed since the opening of the preliminary examination in 2006 and the political changing scene in Afghanistan since then, the lack of cooperation that the Prosecutor has received and which is likely to go scarcer should an investigation be authorized hampering the chances of successful investigation and prosecution, as well as the need for the Court to use its resources prioritizing activities that would have better chances to succeed.

The Chamber believes that, notwithstanding the fact all the relevant requirements are met as regards both jurisdiction and admissibility, the current circumstances of the situation in Afghanistan are such as to make the prospects for a successful investigation and prosecution extremely limited. Accordingly, it is unlikely that pursuing an investigation would result in meeting the objectives listed by the victims favouring the investigation. Thus the Chamber concluded that an investigation into the situation in Afghanistan at this stage would not serve the interests of justice and rejected the Prosecutor's request for authorization to investigate.

Documents Spotlight Buenos Aires Base for International Death Squad Operations sponsored by Condor States; Record Ruthless Repression by Argentine Security Forces during Military Dictatorship, 1976-1983

National Security Archive Commends Completion of U.S. Government’s Special Argentina Project as ‘Model of Declassification Diplomacy’ and Major Contribution to the Cause of Human Rights and History

Revealing CIA “intelligence information cables” on Operation Condor are part of a major collection of records released on April 12 at a government event in Washington D.C., "Declassification Diplomacy: The United States Declassification Project for Argentina."

During the diplomatic ceremony, hosted by U.S. Archivist David Ferriero at the National Archives, U.S. officials turned over some 7500 CIA, FBI, DOD, NSC and State Department records—47,000 pages in total—to Argentina’s Minister of Justice and Human Rights, German Garavano. Garavano graciously thanked the Trump administration for fulfilling a formal request for the records by the Argentine government, made on the fortieth anniversary of the military coup during a state visit to Argentina by then-President Barack Obama.

Moreover, the declassification project has produced a historical roadmap that charts what and when U.S. national security agencies and policy makers knew about the human rights abuses in Argentina—and the actions they took, or failed to take, in response to detailed intelligence on internal and international repression by the military regime.

In his closing remarks at today’s ceremony, National Security Archive analyst Carlos Osorio, who served as an advisor to the Argentina Declassification Project, commended the U.S. government for pursuing what he called “one of the most comprehensive discretionary declassifications of sensitive intelligence records in recent history.” “The Argentina Project represents a new model of declassification diplomacy, and more,” Osorio said. “The release of these documents stands as a uniquely valuable contribution to the cause of human rights, the cause of justice and the cause of our fundamental right-to-know.”

The National Security Archive today posted a selection of 18 CIA, FBI and State Department records from the newly released documents.

In late May 1976, the secret police chieftains of six Southern Cone military regimes gathered at a clandestine summit in Santiago, Chile, to create a “new unit, which was given the code name ‘Teseo’”—a reference to Theseus, the mythical Greek King of the Athenians and heroic slayer of the Minotaur, among other enemies. The mission of “Teseo” was to “conduct physical attacks against subversive targets” abroad, particularly militant Latin American leftists in Europe, according to formerly secret CIA intelligence reports turned over today to Argentina by the U.S. government, and posted for the first time by the nongovernmental National Security Archive.

The "Teseo" program represented a new initiative under "Operation Condor"—the clandestine collaboration of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil to strike at their opposition in the Southern Cone and beyond. At the time, the CIA also managed to obtain the “text of the agreement by Condor countries regulating their operations against subversive targets”—a comprehensive planning paper on financing, staffing, logistics, training, and selection of targets that reveals both the banal and dramatic details of organizing and implementing Condor’s “Teseo” death squad operations. The “Teseo” operations base would be located “at Condor 1 (Argentina).” Each member country was expected to donate $10,000 to offset operational costs; and dues of $200 would be paid “prior to the 30th of each month” for maintenance expenses of the operations center. Expenses for agents on assassination missions abroad were estimated at $3,500 per person for ten days, “with an additional $1000 first time out for clothing allowance.”

Individuals to be eliminated, the Condor agreement stated, would be proposed by member services with “final selection…by vote and on the basis of a simple majority.” As a chilling section titled “Execution of the Target” explained: “This is the responsibility of the operational team which will (A) intercept the target, (B) Carry out the Operation, and (C) Escape. With the exception of the team leaders,” the planning paper stated, “the members of the intelligence and operational teams should not know each other for security and functional reasons.”

WikiLeaks Founder Assange Arrested

Washington Post, Julian Assange, expelled from his embassy perch, will fight extradition from jail, William Booth and Isaac Stanley-Becker​, April 12, 2019. The legal wrangling could take years, possibly reaching the European Court of Human Rights.

Julian Assange, at center, is dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy (Ruptly Photo)

New York Times, Julian Assange Is Arrested; Faces Charge in 2010 U.S. Leak, Eileen Sullivan and Richard Pérez-Peña, April 12, 2019 (print ed.). Britain Acts on U.S. Warrant Against WikiLeaks Founder. Mr. Assange faces one count of conspiracy to hack a computer related to the downloading of U.S. secrets by Chelsea Manning in 2010. The single charge stems from what prosecutors said was his agreement to break a password to a classified United States government computer.

The United States has charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of conspiring to hack a computer as part of the 2010 release of reams of secret American documents, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday, putting him just one flight away from being in American custody after years of seclusion in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

The single charge, conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, was filed a year earlier, in March 2018, and stems from what prosecutors said was his agreement to break a password to a classified United States government computer. It carries a penalty of up to five years in prison and is significant in that it is not an espionage charge, a detail that will come as a relief to press freedom advocates. The United States government had considered until at least last year charging him with an espionage-related offense.

Mr. Assange, 47, has been living at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012. British authorities arrested him on Thursday, heavily bearded and disheveled. A dramatic video showed him shackled and being carried out of the embassy and forced into a police van. He was detained partly in connection with an American extradition warrant after he was evicted by the Ecuadoreans.

Mr. Assange has been in the sights of the United States government since his organization’s 2010 disclosures. Most recently, Mr. Assange has been under attack for his organization’s release during the 2016 presidential campaign of thousands of emails stolen from the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee, leading to a series of revelations that embarrassed the party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. United States investigators have said that the systems were hacked by Russian agents; the conspiracy charge against Mr. Assange unsealed Thursday is not related to the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s election influence.

Mr. Assange will have the right to contest the United States extradition request in British courts. Most people who fight extradition requests argue that the case is politically motivated rather than driven by legitimate legal concerns.

In 2010 WikiLeaks released American files that documented the killing of civilians and journalists and the abuse of detainees by forces of the United States and other countries, airing officials’ unvarnished, often unflattering views of allies and of American actions.

An Army private, Bradley Manning — now known as Chelsea Manning — was convicted of leaking that collection of files and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. President Barack Obama commuted the sentence after Ms. Manning had served almost seven years.

New York Times, Julian Assange: A Foe of Secrecy Who Inspires Admiration and Fury, Scott Shane and Steven Erlanger, April 12, 2019 (print ed.). From his beginnings as a teenage hacker in Australia to his arrest this week in London, the WikiLeaks founder has been a deeply divisive figure. He has helped empower whistle-blowers and disgruntled insiders, but has never been satisfied with the role of neutral provider of information.

The shaky video clips of Julian Assange’s arrest flashed around the world on Thursday, the white-bearded prophet of the age of leaks being hauled by unsmiling security officers to a gray van marked Police.

“We must resist!” he cried. “You can resist!” It was a scene that the very image-conscious Mr. Assange might appreciate: one man literally fighting the all-powerful state.

It was also the latest — and surely not the last — dramatic turn in a career marked by both brilliant achievement and dubious judgment. Mr. Assange has long had a knack for celebrity, and as a tech-savvy, global, almost stateless figure, he captured the new influence the internet could give to individual citizens.

His creation of WikiLeaks helped empower a generation of whistle-blowers and disgruntled insiders who could operate on an industrial scale, providing disclosures by the terabyte and enraging the powerful in many countries. WikiLeaks collaborated closely with major world publications, including The New York Times, in the release of secret records on the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and a quarter-million confidential State Department cables.

New York Times, Is Assange’s Arrest a Threat to the Free Press? Michelle Goldberg, right, April 12, 2019 (print ed.). Last November, federal prosecutors accidentally revealed, in an unrelated court document, that a sealed indictment had been filed against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Many people concerned with civil liberties, including some who despise Assange, were alarmed by the idea that he could be punished for his role in exposing American government secrets.

At the time, the public didn’t know what the actual charges were. Now that Assange has been dragged from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he’s lived for almost seven years, and is facing extradition to the United States, we do. He’s been indicted for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, a result of his alleged attempts nearly a decade ago to help former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning crack a password to a government computer.

These charges do not pose quite the threat to a free press that some feared, because hacking is not standard journalistic practice. “The indictment does not charge Assange for the act of publishing, which would have been a serious Rubicon crossed,” Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s project on speech, privacy and technology, told me. But, as Wizner emphasizes, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about what Donald Trump’s Justice Department is up to. Elements of the Assange indictment could still set a dangerous precedent.

“It was part of the conspiracy that Assange (shown in a file photo) and Manning took measures to conceal Manning as the source of the disclosure of classified records to WikiLeaks,” says the indictment.

Most if not all investigative journalists take such measures to protect their sources. The indictment says, “It was part of the conspiracy that Assange encouraged Manning to provide information and records from departments and agencies of the United States.” Journalists often do this when they urge whistle-blowers to come forward. “It was part of the conspiracy that Assange and Manning used a special folder on a cloud drop box of WikiLeaks” to transmit classified information, the indictment continues. Like many news organizations, The New York Times does something similar, soliciting tips through an encrypted submission system called SecureDrop.

For any of these actions to become part of a criminal conspiracy, there has to be a crime. But as Georgetown law professor David Super points out, “We have right now a criminal code that is bursting at the seams with offenses,” making it easy to break laws without realizing it.

A prosecutor, then, might be able to find a pretext for a similar conspiracy case if, for example, someone decides to leak the Mueller report, or Trump’s tax returns. “This pattern of behavior has already been turned against journalists in many parts of the world,” Super said. Journalists “get prosecuted for pretty mundane stuff, some of which they probably did, but they wouldn’t have been charged for if they didn’t make the regime unhappy.”

Speaking to the Atlantic, Trump lavished praise on his daughter, a 37-year-old White House adviser (shown in her Twitter photo), and suggested she would be suitable for other administration positions, including U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

“She’s a natural diplomat,” Trump said. “She would’ve been great at the United Nations, as an example.”

Asked why he didn’t nominate her, Trump replied: “If I did, they’d say nepotism, when it would’ve had nothing to do with nepotism. But she would’ve been incredible.”

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Investigative Commentary: Trump's international financial policy: "What's yours is mine," Wayne Madsen, April 12, 2019 (subscription required; excerpted with permission). With former Bear Stearns executive David Malpass heading up the World Bank and one-time Goldman Sachs executive Steve Mnuchin as Secretary of the Treasury, Donald Trump and his coterie of grifters are in prime positions to plunder the wealth and natural resources of countries around the world.

Both Malpass and Mnuchin are hedge fund managers. Exploitation of faltering national economies and buying up state-owned resources are a major specialty of hedge funds.

Papal Criticism

Washington Post, Opinion: Pope Benedict shows us how the Catholic Church went so terribly off-course, David Von Drehle, April 12, 2019.There was consternation among Vatican-watchers in 2013 when Pope Benedict XVI became the first pontiff in centuries to resign the papacy rather than die on the job. Would it not be confusing to have two men residing in Roman palaces to whom the Holy Spirit had entrusted the “claves regni caelorum” — the very keys to heaven?

Now that Benedict, born Joseph Ratzinger (shown in a file photo), has broken his six-year official silence to quibble with his successor on the topic of sex abuse in the church, confusion is no longer a hypothesis. It’s murky indeed when Pope A offers veiled criticism of Pope B in the pages of a Bavarian periodical. As anyone who has co-parented children knows, authority figures who are not on the same page will be played against one another. So it is with Roman Catholic leaders today: Conservatives who don’t like the tendencies of Pope Francis are looking to their preferred pope for the doctrinal equivalent of ice cream and a later bedtime.

But, in another respect, Benedict’s strange, self-justifying public letter is clarifying. It shows, not always intentionally, how the Catholic Church went so terribly off-course, and why this important institution is having so much trouble finding its way. When a hierarchy makes itself accountable only to God, but at the same time grants itself sole power to speak on behalf of the Almighty, and then cloisters itself amid opulence and toadies, the result is a monstrous indifference.

April 11

More On Assange Arrest

Euronews, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrested and dragged out of embassy, Rachael Kennedy, April 11, 2019. WikLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has been arrested at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, ending his seven-year asylum tenure there. The Metropolitan Police confirmed the arrest was based on an extradition request on behalf of the US, and for skipping bail in the UK, in a statement released on Thursday morning.

Assange is wanted in the US over an investigation into WikiLeaks' leaking of classified documents concerning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is wanted in the UK for breaching his conditions of bail in 2012 — it was granted amid a case that would see him extradited to Sweden to face charges of rape and sexual assault.

[Justice Integrity Project Editor's Note: Assange was never charged in Sweden and the procedures strongly suggested a political vendetta and possible entrapment and smear by intelligence agencies and their allies in the media and courts, according to our extensive reporting beginning in 2010.]

To avoid extradition, Assange took up asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, where he had been until today.

Swedish prosecutors eventually dropped the rape charge in 2017, however, the alleged victim indicated on Thursday a wish to reopen the case, following Assange's arrest. Chief Prosecutor Ingrid Isgren said Sweden was watching the developments, but was not yet able to "take a position" with the information available.

Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno said the decision to remove Assange's asylum was made over "repeated violations" to international conventions and "daily life protocols."

The arrest came just a day after WikiLeaks held a press conference saying it found Assange had been a victim of an "extensive spying operation." Individuals in Spain had demanded a €3 million ransom for a "massive trove of documents" accumulated on him, which included video and audio recordings inside the Ecuadorian embassy, and other documents.

Wikileaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson said he believed the documents were going to be handed over to US authorities to aid in an extradition case, but at the time he said he had no hard evidence to prove it.

President Lenín Moreno (left) of Ecuador said on Twitter that his country had decided to stop sheltering Mr. Assange after “his repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols,” a decision that cleared the way for the British authorities to detain him.

The relationship between Mr. Assange and Ecuador has been a rocky one, even as it offered him refuge and even citizenship, and WikiLeaks said last Friday that Ecuador “already has an agreement with the UK for his arrest” and predicted that Mr. Assange would be expelled from the embassy “within ‘hours to days.’”

New York Times, Omar Hassan al-Bashir Is Removed as Sudan’s President, Joseph Goldstein, Declan Walsh and Austin Ramzy, April 11, 2019. The leader was forced out after months of protests. He is accused of war crimes and genocide against his own people. The defense minister said that Mr. al-Bashir was taken into custody and that the military would be in charge during a two-year transition period.

Sudan’s military ousted President Omar al-Bashir on Thursday, the defense minister announced, ending a 30-year authoritarian rule in the face of mass street protests that have swept the country.

Defense Minister Awad Mohamed Ahmed Ibn Auf said that Mr. al-Bashir had been taken into custody and that the government had been dissolved and the Constitution suspended. He said there would be a two-year transition period, with the military in charge, and announced a 10 p.m. curfew.

Mr. al-Bashir, 75, who has long been regarded as a pariah in the West and is wanted by the International Criminal Court on genocide charges in connection with atrocities in Darfur, had ruled Sudan longer than any leader since the country gained independence in 1956.

As a schoolboy working on a construction site, he told supporters in January, he fell and broke the tooth while carrying a heavy load. Instead of seeking treatment he rinsed his mouth with saltwater and kept working.

Later, after he joined the army, he refused a silver tooth implant because he wanted to remember his hardships. “This one,” he said, pointing to a gap in his mouth, as supporters erupted into laughter.

The story was a way for Mr. al-Bashir, who was ousted Thursday after 30 years of iron-fisted rule over Sudan, to play up his humble origins — to show that he remained a man of the people who, like him, hailed from dusty farming villages on the Nile.

Trump Probes

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Investigation/commentary: Is William Barr a "peripheral third party" in the Mueller report? Wayne Madsen (WMR editor, syndicated columnist, author), April 11, 2019 (subscription required; excerpted with permission). Attorney General William Barr told the House Appropriations Committee that the 400-page report by Robert Mueller on the 2016 Trump campaign’s foreign connections is being redacted of all information dealing with grand jury hearings, information that would reveal intelligence sources or methods, information on other current investigations, and information that would “unduly infringe on the personal privacy and representational interests of peripheral third parties.”

Barr may have a major conflict-of-interest in the last category. While many pundits are viewing “peripheral third parties” as Donald Trump daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as Trump’s two sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, the category of third parties might include Barr himself.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump has made the mistake of awakening a monster, Bill Palmer, April 11, 2019. Here’s what someone once said about Nancy Pelosi: “She’ll cut your head off and you won’t even know you’re bleeding.” That quote came from Pelosi’s own daughter. The current Speaker of the House is so politically savvy, calm, and collected, she can do a lot of damage to her opponents while smiling the entire time. Here’s the thing. Pelosi is no longer smiling. Not even close.

When Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House earlier this year, she said that impeaching Donald Trump at that time wasn’t worth it, and she’d wait until the Mueller probe and/or other investigations turned up more about Trump’s crimes. It was a wise move. If she’d pushed forward with impeachment three months ago, it would have gotten through the House but certainly not the Senate, and all it would have done was make Trump more emboldened.

So Pelosi has held her fire, preferring to let the House committee chairs push forward with their probes, all while waiting for Trump to hand her an opening. He just did. Trump’s Attorney General William Barr thumbed his nose at Congress about the Mueller report yesterday, while repeating one of Trump’s most deranged phony conspiracy theories. Then Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin thumbed his nose at Congress as well when he announced that he was illegally refusing to turn over Trump’s tax returns.

These two scoundrels just declared war against American democracy, on Trump’s behalf. If Trump wants a war, and he clearly does, Nancy Pelosi is going to give him one. When she spoke before the cameras yesterday and accused Barr of having gone “off the rails,” you could clearly see from her tone and body language that Trump and his stooges had crossed her red line.

New York Times, Retiring as a Judge, Trump’s Sister Ends Court Inquiry Into Her Role in Tax Dodges, Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, April 10, 2019. Maryanne Trump Barry faced complaints of judicial misconduct after a New York Times investigation found she had engaged in fraudulent tax schemes with her siblings. President Trump’s older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, has retired as a federal appellate judge, ending an investigation into whether she violated judicial conduct rules by participating in fraudulent tax schemes with her siblings.

The court inquiry stemmed from complaints filed last October, after an investigation by The New York Times found that the Trumps had engaged in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the inherited wealth of Mr. Trump and his siblings. Judge Barry not only benefited financially from most of those tax schemes, The Times found; she was also in a position to influence the actions taken by her family.

Judge Barry, now 82, has not heard cases in more than two years but was still listed as an inactive senior judge, one step short of full retirement. In a letter dated Feb. 1, a court official notified the four individuals who had filed the complaints that the investigation was “receiving the full attention” of a judicial conduct council. Ten days later, Judge Barry filed her retirement papers.

The status change rendered the investigation moot, since retired judges are not subject to the conduct rules. The people who filed the complaints were notified last week that the matter had been dropped without a finding on the merits of the allegations. The decision has not yet been made public, but copies were provided to The Times by two of the complainants. Both are involved in the legal profession.

Judicial council reviews can result in the censure or reprimand of federal judges, and in extremely rare cases, a referral to the House of Representatives for impeachment.

In retirement, Judge Barry is entitled to receive annually the salary she earned when she last met certain workload requirements. Though the exact figure was not immediately available, it appears to be between $184,500 and $217,600.

The Times investigation focused on how the profits and ownership of the real estate empire built by the president’s father, Fred C. Trump, were transferred to Donald J. Trump and his siblings, often in ways designed to dodge gift and estate taxes.

A lawyer for the president, Charles J. Harder, said last fall, “The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory.”

DCReport.com, Investigative commentary: The Tyranny of Donald J. Trump, David Cay Johnston, right, April 11, 2019. Two Generations of Tax Cheating, and Now He Holds Himself and His Family Above the Law. Donald J. Trump and his team have now openly declared that he is above the law rather than, as our Constitution provides, a public servant whose duty is to faithfully execute the law. His administration is taking numerous steps that move us in the direction of a Trumpian dictatorship by defeating the rule of law, something I’ve warned about since 2016. We’ll look at one aspect of this today: Trump family taxes.

Trump and his team insist that no one is ever going to see his tax returns, which he promised voters he would make public as every president has done back to Richard Nixon.

Now his sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, has scurried away from the investigative spotlight of her fellow federal judges, who were looking into whether she was a tax cheat in black robes. By resigning from the federal bench, Trump’s older sister ends that inquiry, the kind of legal favor our system affords those in positions of power to escape scrutiny.

As for defiance of the law, Trump, his personal lawyers and the White House acting chief of staff all declared in recent days that they will defy a 1924 anti-corruption statute that gives certain members of Congress, and one Congressional employee, the unqualified authority to examine any tax return.

No previous president has defied the statute ordering the Treasury to handover tax returns, and no document request has ever been refused.

Trump claims that “the law is 100% on my side” in refusing the turn over the documents. In fact, the law is 100% against Trump. When I asked a half dozen former top Congressional tax-writing staffers about Trump’s claim some of them laughed out loud, while others said in sober turns that there is no legal argument on Trump’s side – none.

The most direct Trump declaration that he is above the law is his directing the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service to keep his federal income tax returns locked up. No previous president has defied this statute and no document request has ever been refused, a host of people who worked for the tax-writing committees on Capitol Hill told me.

Trump’s arguments are mere political rhetoric. But it gets worse than that.

Trump lawyer William S. Consovoy in an April 5 letter asked Treasury to hold back the documents. Consovoy asserted mind-reading powers in his letter: “His request is a transparent effort by one political party to harass an official from the other party because they dislike his politics and speech.”

Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, declared on Fox News Sunday that the Trump administration will “never” comply with the law.

Trump and his team are now openly declaring that Trump is above the law, a clear step toward a dictatorship. Our David Cay Johnston explains in the first of several pieces examining official lawlessness.

Manhattan DC Role In Epstein Scandal

New York Post, DA knew Jeffrey Epstein was a dangerous pedophile when arguing for leniency, Susan Edelman and Rebecca Rosenberg, April 11, 2019. The Manhattan DA’s office had graphic and detailed evidence of pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s depravity when a prosecutor inexplicably argued for leniency during his 2011 sex offender registry hearing, The Post has learned.

In advance of the hearing, then-deputy chief of Sex Crimes, Jennifer Gaffney, had been given a confidential state assessment that deemed Epstein to be highly dangerous and likely to keep preying on young girls, the DA’s office admitted in its own appellate brief eight months after the hearing.

The brief has been sealed since 2011, but The Post obtained it Thursday after suing to get it unsealed.

It describes a state assessment’s findings that Epstein (right) should be monitored in New York as a level three offender — reserved for the most dangerous.

In making its assessment, the NY state Board of Examiners of Sex Offenders evaluated the sworn, corroborated accounts of numerous young girls who had been lured into Epstein’s Palm Beach, Fla., compound in 2005 and 2006.

Girls aged 14 to 17 years old were recruited and paid $200 to $1,000 to give Epstein erotic massages that included sexual contact, intercourse and rape, Palm Beach cops found.

Epstein pleaded guilty in Palm Beach to abusing just one of these young victims, and was required to register as a sex offender in New York since he had an Upper East Side home.

Manhattan prosecutors were aware the state board had assigned Epstein a risk assessment of 130, a number that is “solidly above the 110 qualifying number for level three,” with “absolutely no basis for downward departure,” the brief notes.

U.S. Politics

New York Times, Pete Buttigieg Challenges Religious Right on Their Own Turf, Jeremy W. Peters, April 11, 2019 (print ed.). Mr. Buttigieg has confronted evangelicals like Vice President Mike Pence, questioning the moral authority of religious leaders who have stayed silent on President Trump’s conduct.

As a religious gay man who believes his party has ceded discussion of religion and spirituality to Republicans, Pete Buttigieg (right), a Democratic candidate for president, is talking about God and sexuality in an unconventional way: He is using the language of faith to confront the Christian right on territory they have long claimed as their own.

Mr. Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., has provoked a backlash from conservatives in the last few days after questioning the moral authority of evangelicals like Vice President Mike Pence who remain silent about President Trump’s personal conduct yet disapprove of same-sex marriages and oppose gay rights.

He followed through with another lawsuit this week against McClatchy, parent company of The Fresno Bee.

Both lawsuits were filed by an attorney based in Charlottesville, Virginia, a solo-practitioner named Steven S. Biss who is making a name for himself suing media organizations for defamation.

With the Nunes lawsuits, Biss has thrust himself into the national spotlight and, like his client, opened himself up to criticism on Twitter and elsewhere.

The attention exposed a factual error in Biss’ initial filing against McClatchy. It also drove social media discussion this week about a similar case he filed that was dismissed without a judgment and his year-long suspension from practicing law a decade ago.

Biss, a graduate of University of Richmond School of Law, did not return a call requesting comment.

Nunes announced the lawsuit seeking $150 million from McClatchy on Monday night. It accuses the publisher and Republican political strategist Liz Mair of defamation and conspiracy against Nunes, citing stories by The Fresno Bee and McClatchy. The stories detailed Nunes’ investment in a winery that had been sued over a yacht party that allegedly included underage sex workers and cocaine, and Nunes’ use of Political Action Committee money to buy tickets to Celtics games.

Less than a day after filing, the lawsuit against McClatchy appeared to be amended Tuesday due to a factual inaccuracy that Biss was lambasted for online.

In the original version of the lawsuit, Nunes and Biss accuse a Fresno Bee reporter of emphasizing the words “woman,” “Devin,” and “cocaine” with a bold font in a tweet about the story on the winery lawsuit. While a screenshot of the tweet in the original lawsuit showed the words in bold font, the original tweet has text only in plain font.

Law blogs called it an “embarrassing mistake over how Twitter works,” and Twitter users started pointing out the discrepancy, noting that when users search certain words on Twitter the resulting tweets show the words searched for in bold.

When Narendra Modi takes the stage — right on time — he delivers a speech bristling with nationalist fervor. Together, he tells the crowd, they will create a “new India.” It is a place where the armed forces are respected, the corrupt are fearful, and terrorists are killed “in their homes.” Modi watches over the nation, he says, while his opponents undermine it.

Nearly 900 million eligible voters are set to choose the leader of the world’s largest democracy in staggered polls starting Thursday. But Modi is framing the election as a referendum on a single man: himself.

New York Times, Under Modi, a Hindu Nationalist Surge Has Further Divided India, Jeffrey Gettleman, Kai Schultz, Suhasini Raj and Hari Kumar, April 11, 2019. A conservative political movement that strives to make India a Hindu state has never been more enfranchised at every level of government. Now, with national elections underway, and another term likely for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, minorities are worried.

In the machine tools market in the catacombs of Old Delhi, Muslims dominate the business stalls. But at night, they say, they are increasingly afraid to walk alone. And when they talk politics, their voices drop to a whisper.

“I could be lynched right now and nobody would do anything about it,” said Abdul Adnan, a Muslim who sells drill bits. “My government doesn’t even consider me Indian. How can that be when my ancestors have lived here hundreds of years?”

When Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, was elected in 2014, it was with broad support for his sweeping promises to modernize India’s economy, fight corruption and aggressively assert India’s role in the world. Five years later, he is widely seen as having made at least some progress on those issues.

Gregory B. Craig, a White House counsel in the Obama administration, was charged on Thursday with lying to the Justice Department and concealing information about work he did in 2012 for the Russia-aligned government of Ukraine.

The indictment of Mr. Craig, 74, stemmed from an investigation initiated by the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

An Ivy League-educated lawyer who held prominent positions in the administrations of President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama, Mr. Craig becomes the first person associated with the Democratic Party to be charged in a case linked to the special counsel’s investigation.

Before the indictment, Mr. Craig’s lawyers asserted that the case against their client was flimsy, pointing out that Mr. Mueller’s team referred it to federal prosecutors in Manhattan last year for potential prosecution related to foreign lobbying laws, but that they did not bring charges. Instead, the case was moved in January to Washington.

New York Times, Retiring as a Judge, Trump’s Sister Ends Court Inquiry Into Her Role in Tax Dodges, Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, April 10, 2019. Maryanne Trump Barry faced complaints of judicial misconduct after a New York Times investigation found she had engaged in fraudulent tax schemes with her siblings. Maryanne Trump Barry, President Trump’s older sister, faced accusations of judicial misconduct over her role in the fraudulent tax schemes reported by The Times. She decided to retire, making her immune from misconduct proceedings.

President Trump’s older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, has retired as a federal appellate judge, ending an investigation into whether she violated judicial conduct rules by participating in fraudulent tax schemes with her siblings.

The court inquiry stemmed from complaints filed last October, after an investigation by The New York Times found that the Trumps had engaged in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the inherited wealth of Mr. Trump and his siblings. Judge Barry not only benefited financially from most of those tax schemes, The Times found; she was also in a position to influence the actions taken by her family.

Avenatti, known for representing Stormy Daniels in lawsuits against President Trump, was arrested last month in New York for allegedly attempting to extort millions of dollars from Nike. Separately, he was charged in a case in California for allegedly using a client’s settlement money to pay for his personal expenses.

The grand jury indictment, which was handed down late Wednesday, charges the attorney with wire fraud, bank fraud and tax fraud, among other things.

Specifically, it alleges that Avenatti stole from his clients, including from a paraplegic man, and took payroll taxes from employees at his Seattle-based coffee chain, Tully’s, according to the AP. The AP reported that the attorney is also charged with failing to pay taxes, lying in bankruptcy proceedings and committing bank fraud.

Former Lobbyist Joins Trump Cabinet

New York Times, The Senate confirmed David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist, as interior secretary, Coral Davenport, April 11, 2019. The Senate on Thursday voted to confirm David Bernhardt, a former lobbyist for the oil and agribusiness industries, as secretary of the interior. The confirmation of Mr. Bernhardt to his new post coincided with calls from more than a dozen Democrats and government watchdogs for formal investigations into his past conduct.

Senators voted 56-41, largely along party lines, in favor of Mr. Bernhardt’s confirmation. Two Democrats, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Energy Committee, and Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, crossed party lines to vote in favor of Mr. Bernhardt.

As interior secretary, Mr. Bernhardt, who has already played a central role in designing many of Mr. Trump’s policies for expanding drilling and mining, will now serve as the nation’s senior steward of its 500 million acres of public land and vast coastal waters.

Robin and David Kowalski barely recognized their daughter Bailey when she was visiting home in White Lake, Mich., in the spring of 2015.

Their perennially positive daughter, who was about to finish her freshman year at Michigan State, was sullen. She had suddenly decided to abandon her long-held dream of being a sports journalist, and she refused to tell her mother, in whom she typically confided everything, why.

It was not until October, after months of erratic behavior, that Ms. Kowalski told her parents that she had been raped by three Michigan State basketball players that April. The incident left her depressed and considering harming herself. She dropped out of college for a while and received counseling. She gave up sports journalism for good.

Last year, Ms. Kowalski, 22, who is speaking publicly about her case for the first time, sued Michigan State in federal court for violating her rights under Title IX, the federal law mandating gender equity in higher education, as a Jane Doe. The lawsuit asserts that Michigan State mishandles sexual misconduct complaints against athletes. One woman said two football players raped her in 2009, but she was not advised of her Title IX rights, the lawsuit said, and another woman said three basketball players raped her in 2010, after which the accusations were not reported outside the athletic department.

Palmer Report, Opinion: The real reason the United States chose right now to take down Julian Assange, Bill Palmer, April 11, 2019. UK authorities just hauled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange out of the Ecuadorian Embassy, based on an extradition request from the United States. It’s a move that a lot of people have been waiting a long time for – particularly with regard to finally getting answers in the 2016 Trump-Russia election scandal. But the question must be asked: why now? There are two potentially plausible scenarios, so let’s lay them out.

First there’s the doomsday scenario: new Attorney General William Barr fired Special Counsel Robert Mueller before he could get to Assange, and now Barr is seizing Assange to try to make sure the truth never comes out. Considering that Assange is being arrested just weeks after Mueller’s investigation abruptly ended under highly suspicious circumstances, and Barr’s obviously corrupt desire to protect Trump at all costs, this does seem plausible.

Then there’s essentially the opposite scenario: the takedown of Assange (right) is just the latest move by the non-corrupt elements in the DOJ to continue carrying out Robert Mueller’s gameplan, and Barr either wouldn’t or couldn’t stop the takedown from happening. We’ve already seen various DOJ prosecutors pushing forward with Mueller’s grand jury work against Roger Stone, and whoever’s financial records are being targeted by the subpoena of that mystery foreign government owned company.

Legal experts are saying that it could take several months (or longer) before the Assange extradition process plays out and he’s handed over to the United States. In the meantime he’ll be held in UK custody, where U.S. investigators can petition to interview him. So if and when House investigative leaders like Adam Schiff ask to travel to London to interview Assange about the Trump-Russia scandal, we’ll see if the DOJ tries to work with or against such requests – and that’ll tell us why the DOJ made this move now.

Arab Emirates & Israel

Strategic Culture Foundation, Analysis: The Dis-United Arab Emirates, Wayne Madsen, April 11, 2019. A recent Beverly Hills, California political campaign fundraiser for Donald Trump, co-sponsored by Republican National Committee deputy national finance chairman Elliott Broidy – whose Los Angeles office was raided in March of this year by the Federal Bureau of Investigation – is raising eyebrows in Middle Eastern capitals.

Broidy (right), a major figure in the Republican Jewish Coalition, is under law enforcement investigation for selling access to Trump and other administration officials. FBI agents seized documents in Broidy’s office related to potentially illegal “pay-to-play” operations involving Broidy’s firms and the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, in addition to a Broidy extortion attempt against Qatar.

The decision to sell came after the hedge fund manager whose firm controls American Media became “disgusted” with the Enquirer’s reporting tactics, according to one of these people.

American Media has been under intense pressure because of the Enquirer’s efforts to tilt the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump, who is a longtime friend of American Media’s president and CEO, David Pecker. Pecker and his supermarket tabloid have also been embroiled in recent months in an unusually public feud with Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.

In August, just as AMI and two of its top officers were finalizing a non-prosecution agreement with federal investigators, the company’s board of directors started looking for ways to unload the tabloid business “because they didn’t want to deal with hassles like this anymore,” another person said.

I work on S.E.O., which stands for search engine optimization. On a daily basis, my job is not just focused on helping to optimize our stories for greater visibility and increased traffic from search engines such as Google. It’s much more.

We have a large newsroom, and we are constantly educating editors, reporters and more on the best practices when it comes to search — whether it has to do with headlines, URLs, timing or story forms. Additionally, we are teaching them how to spot how well their story is doing on search.

I usually start my day around 6 or 7 a.m. and track everything that happened overnight to get an idea of what to focus on in the morning hours. After that, I start making my rounds on competitive websites and using our trends tools to find potential ideas I can pitch to desks or optimize something correctly that we’ve already published. I then start jumping into conversations with desk editors about what they have coming for the day that they want me to keep an eye on. I’m big on getting ahead of things, as it gives much more free time to work on strategic initiatives throughout the day.

On a tools front, I use Google Trends, Kaleida, NewsWhip, Reddit and CrowdTangle. I like these tools because they incorporate search, social and the conversations around them.

Outside of that, it’s important to look at whom we consider to be our competitors and what they are doing daily around general news and trending items. It allows me to see what stories we may be missing and what angles we may not be exploring.

Israeli Elections

Washington Post, Netanyahu appears set to clinch fifth term in office in Israel, Loveday Morris and Ruth Eglash, April 10, 2019. With the vast majority of votes counted, the parties of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his chief rival were both on track to win 35 seats in parliament. But Netanyahu had the best chance at forming a coalition.

New York Times, News Analysis: It’s Netanyahu’s Israel Now, David M. Halbfinger, April 10, 2019. Benjamin Netanyahu’s apparent re-election as prime minister of Israel attests to a starkly conservative vision of the Jewish state and its people about where they are and where they are headed.

They prize stability, as well as the military and economic security that Mr. Netanyahu has delivered.

Though in many ways they have never been safer, they remain afraid — especially of Iran and its influence over their neighbors, against which Mr. Netanyahu has relentlessly crusaded. They are persuaded by his portrayal of those who challenge him, whether Arab citizens or the left, as enemies of the state. They take his resemblance to authoritarian leaders around the world as evidence that he was ahead of the curve.

They credit Mr. Netanyahu (right), whose strategic vision values power and fortitude above all, with piloting Israel to unprecedented diplomatic heights and believe still more is possible. And they are loath to let anyone less experienced take the controls.

“Let’s be honest with ourselves,” said Michael B. Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington. “Our economy is excellent, our foreign relations were never better, and we’re secure. We’ve got a guy in politics for 40 years: We know him, the world knows him — even our enemies know him.”

Not everyone is so enamored of him.

Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition appears to have won 65 of the 120 seats in Parliament. But his positions on the issues differed little from those of his main challenger, Benny Gantz (shown in a portrait in his previous post as head of the Israel Defense Forces), suggesting that close to half of the electorate would have simply preferred someone else in the job.

RFK Book, Speeches, Inspiration

Media executive Rick Allen and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, eldest daughter of Robert Kennedy and former lieutenant governor of Maryland, discuss the book collection of RFK speeches that Allen co-edited with the late Edwin Guthman, RFK: His Words for Our Times, at the National Press Club on April 10. Photo: Justice Integrity Project / Andrew Kreig

National Press Club, RFK’s civility, eloquence a lesson for today’s politicians, daughter says, Chris Teale, April 10, 2019. Robert F. Kennedy’s ability to win over hostile crowds and be civil during debates would serve politicians well in the present day, his daughter Kathleen Kennedy Townsend said during a Vook Event at the National Press Club Wednesday evening.

Townsend said Kennedy’s willingness to take on difficult opponents, like mob bosses or hostile crowds calling for civil rights, showed he wanted to engage with everyone and use civility while doing so.

Along with co=author and editor Rick Allen, she discussed their book, RFK: His Words For Our Times, which collates Robert Kennedy’s speeches and writings and puts them in the context of their time.

“He was able to win over people not by saying, ‘You’re selfish, you’re terrible,’ but by asking what kind of country you want to live in,” Townsend said of her father..

The book, re-released to mark the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s 1968 assassination, includes speeches he gave as attorney general, a U.S. Senator for New York and as a presidential candidate, as well as other writing. And given the current rancor surrounding the American political scene, Townsend and Allen said Kennedy’s words and actions are more important than ever.

Townsend recalled how he went to speak before pro-Communist crowds in places like Japan and Chile. In in the face of hostile crowds trying to drown out his speech, she said, he would welcome local leaders on-stage and debate issues with them. In Japan, Townsend said, his actions “rippled through Japanese society broadly and made him so popular it raised the level of respect for the United States immensely, enormously.”

As an elected official, Kennedy shed light on people in areas like Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta who lived in extreme poverty, using his high profile and the media to tell their stories.

Allen said that in Washington and elsewhere, it shocked people who were seeing “extraordinary poverty that most Americans couldn’t believe existed in our country.” Townsend said he used those trips as teaching moments for his children and younger generations.“He was always telling us how lucky we were, and how much we had to do for our country,” she said.

With campaigning for the 2020 election already underway, Townsend said the long campaign as candidates traverse the country stumping for votes will make candidates stronger and give voters a real choice. She also said it is important that they use language that doesn't inflame divisions, which Kennedy was a master of.

Townsend recalled hearing him memorizing quotes from William Shakespeare in their bathroom, or referring to other great works of literature during his time in the car on the way to his office. It is rare, she said, to see politicians so obsessed with finding the right words.

“That doesn’t happen often for politicians, and it happened because he cared so much about language, about words and how it can lift us all up,” Townsend said.

Barr's Spin?

Washington Post, Barr says he thinks ‘spying did occur’ in probe of Trump campaign associates, Devlin Barrett and Karoun Demirjian​, April 10, 2019. Attorney General William P. Barr (right) said Wednesday he thought “spying” on a political campaign occurred in the course of intelligence agencies’ investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election — a startling assertion by the nation’s top law enforcement official.

At a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Barr was asked about his statement a day earlier that he would review how the FBI launched its counterintelligence investigation that sought to determine whether Donald Trump’s associates were interacting with Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal. It’s a big deal,” said Barr, noting that there are long-held rules to prevent intelligence agencies from collecting information on domestic political figures.

“I’m not suggesting that those rules were violated, but I think it’s important to look at that,” he said. “I’m not talking about the FBI necessarily but intelligence agencies more broadly.”

Current and former law enforcement officials have defended their handling of the Russia investigation, saying it was carefully handled based on available evidence, and they have firmly denied they engaged in political spying. Those current and former officials have argued they were obligated to investigate allegations that Trump associates might be conspiring with Russians to interfere in the election.

Washington Post, Opinion: William Barr, Trump toady, Jennifer Rubin (right), April 10, 2019.The Post reports: "Attorney General William P. Barr said Wednesday he thought “spying” on a political campaign occurred in the course of intelligence agencies’ investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election — a startling assertion by the nation’s top law enforcement official. . . ."

This is the language of a PR spinner, not the attorney general of the United States. As my colleague Aaron Blake points out, “spying” is a loaded phrase and a political accusation.

Moreover, the Justice Department itself has refuted this notion, making clear that the Russia probe began before the government’s surveillance of Carter Page.

Now, if you didn’t already think Barr was failing to fulfill his oath to enforce the laws as the people’s lawyer (not Trump’s lawyer), this latest episode might do it.

Remember that Barr already substituted his own “exoneration” of Trump on obstruction of justice (something the Justice Department’s guidelines specify should be a matter for Congress and not for the department), refused to use summaries that Robert S. Mueller III’s team prepared in favor of his misleading summary (which he later claimed was not a summary), has failed to turn over the report or Mueller summaries to Congress in a timely manner and has refused to make an unredacted version of the report available to Congress. All in all, it’s a shabby record of politicizing the Justice Department in a way that his predecessors avoided.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Nancy Pelosi has had enough of Donald Trump’s crap, BD Holly, April 10, 2019. Attorney General William Barr’s self-serving and shortsighted answers to the questions asked of him during his public testimony on Wednesday were predictably favorable to Donald Trump, but might have served an unintended purpose – unchaining the inner mounting wrath of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi (shown in her Twitter photo) said this to reporters on Wednesday: “How very, very dismaying and disappointing that the chief law enforcement officer of our country is going off the rails,” likely a response to Barr’s bizarre echoing of a Trump fantasy that the Obama administration had spied on the Trump team. As though he believed his blind monarchical loyalty insufficient in cementing his manifestly partisan stance, he admitted that he had no evidence to corroborate this claim. Now that there’s no shadow of a doubt that our Attorney General is an utter stooge, where in the system do we look for a check on his bias?

He had threatened to close the southern border and ordered a halt to foreign aid for three Central American nations. But as President Trump weighed his next move to respond to a mounting immigration crisis, he had another problem: His homeland security chief was in Europe on a week-long business trip.

The location of Kirstjen Nielsen (right), the embattled leader of the Department of Homeland Security, on April 1 was like a bad joke for a president who vowed to curb unauthorized immigration but was now showing signs of panic as border crossings spiked to the highest levels in more than a decade.

Nielsen, who had barely hung on to her job during previous run-ins with Trump, cut her trip short and flew back to Washington. Upon returning, she furiously tried to save her job. Nielsen convened emergency calls with White House aides and Cabinet officials to urge them to help her on immigration, White House officials said. She ordered U.S. Customs and Border Protection to deploy “emergency surge operations,” shifting up to 750 officers from other duties to help the overwhelmed Border Patrol. But by then it was too late.

“President Obama had child separation. Take a look. The press knows it, you know it, we all know it. I didn’t have — I’m the one that stopped it. President Obama had child separation. … President Obama separated children. They had child separation. I was the one that changed it, okay?”

The Trump International Hotel and Tower in Manhattan, near the southwest corner of Central Park, is a 44-story building with a mix of luxury condominiums and hotel suites that go for more than $2,500 a night.

Unit 32G, a two-bedroom, 1,767-square-foot apartment with sweeping views of the park, is owned by an entity called Ecree, which bought the condo in 2014 for $7 million in cash.

Documents unearthed by the nonprofit group Global Witness show that the purchase was funded by the daughter of the Republic of Congo’s president, a longtime target of anti-corruption investigators. The funds for the all-cash purchase appear to have been siphoned from that country’s government, according to a report by Global Witness.

Pop Culture

New York Times, At the Friars Club, When the Laughter Stopped, Rachel Abrams, April 10, 2019. Financial ills and a federal investigation have led to discord at the 115-year-old club, whose members have included entertainment industry legends.

Judge Blocks Trump Asylum Tactic

Washington Post, Judge blocks administration plan forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for hearings, Maria Sacchetti​, April 10, 2019 (print ed.). The ruling is a major blow to a program the Trump administration hoped would curb an influx of families at the southern border. A federal judge on Monday blocked an experimental Trump administration policy that requires asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases make their way through the U.S. immigration court system, a major blow to President Trump’s efforts to stem the surge of crossings at the southern border.

U.S. District Judge Richard ­Seeborg in San Francisco enjoined the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) policy days after outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen pledged to expand the program. The policy began in January at the San Ysidro port of entry in California but has been extended to the Calexico, Calif., entry and to the entry in El Paso, and Seeborg wrote that the approach would have been further extended if the court had not stepped in.

Several hundred migrants have been returned to Mexico under the program after seeking asylum at the border.

Politico, Flynn's ex-partner wins access to lawyers' files, Josh Gerstein, April 10, 2019. A federal judge has granted Gen. Michael Flynn's former business partner access to records Flynn's attorneys prepared as they engaged with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team in negotiations that led to Flynn's guilty plea to a felony false statement charge over a year ago.

U.S. District Court Judge Anthony Trenga ruled that Flynn's ex-partner, Bijan Kian, is entitled to notes and other records produced by several lawyers working for Flynn's now-defunct consulting firm, Flynn Intelligence Group.

Kian's legal team subpoenaed the records as he prepares for a July trial in Alexandria, Virginia, on an indictment charging him with conspiring with the former national security adviser (shown at right) and a Turkish national, Karim Alptekin, to act as unregistered agents for Turkey.

Flynn, who is still awaiting sentencing, escaped charges in the Turkey-focused case and is expected to be the government's star witness at his former partner's trial.

Telesur, Venezuela's Moncada Fires Back at Pence in Heated UNSC Exchange, Staff report, April 11, 2019. "The only state representing Venezuela is the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela," he said and framed the so-called humanitarian crisis as "part of the machinary of lies spread about the government of Venezuela." As part of his argument against the legitimate Venezuelan government, Pence (right) also told Venezuela’s Ambassador Samuel Moncada “with all due respect, you shouldn’t be here.”

In response, Russia’s United Nations permanent representative Vasily Nebenzya questioned the real intentions behind the U.S. aid and stressed that Venezuela does not reject international cooperation when it is friendly.

"The U.S. has still not overcome the devastation of Hurricane Maria," the Russian ambassador said in response to Pence claiming the U.S. is trying to deliver aid to Venezuela, adding that the Venezuelan government "is not rejecting humanitarian assistance. Russia and other countries have provided assistance along with WHO."

During his speech, the Russian ambassador pointed out that the current situation in Venezuela is related to the U.S. geopolitical interest of controlling the region. "If you want to make America great again stop interfering in the interest of other states," Nebenzya said and, addressing the Latin American neighboring, made it clear that “Venezuela is a bargaining chip for geopolitical influence in the world."

Once the first round of statements was concluded, Venezuela’s Ambassador Samuel Moncada took the stage and strongly rejected the U.S. interpretation of what is happening in his country.

"To begin, I think it is called upon us to speak on the falsehoods that have been spoken about Venezuela,” he said and denounced that a new coup attempt had just happened yesterday, as “the U.S. is attempting to pillage our resources.”

Moncada also expressed his categorical denial of the U.S. statements, which has no basis in the Venezuelan constitution and laws. "The only state representing Venezuela is the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela," he said and framed the so-called humanitarian crisis as "part of the machinery of lies spread about the government of Venezuela.”

The prior Security Council meeting on Venezuela was held on Feb. 28, when Russia, China and South Africa vetoed a U.S. draft resolution in which the Venezuelan government would have been held responsible for the country's economic collapse, a political maneuver aimed at disguising the U.S. economic war against the government of Nicolas Maduro.

As the new acting secretary at DHS, McAleenan (right) faces the largest wave of illegal crossings at the Mexico border in more than a decade. In Washington, he’ll contend with an impatient boss who is demanding an immediate halt to the surge. And to deliver that, McAleenan will have to court Democratic lawmakers with little political incentive to help the White House ahead of the 2020 election.

McAleenan — the current commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection — presents as a natural leader of DHS, a no-nonsense law enforcement official with longtime practical immigration experience. For a president who places a premium on appearances, McAleenan, 47, also looks the part, with close-cropped hair and a stern bearing.

New York Times, Opinion: Kirstjen Nielsen Enforced Cruelty at the Border. Her Replacement Could Be Worse, Editorial Board, April 9, 2019 (print ed.). She will be remembered for the forced separation of thousands of migrant families. She was said to have become increasingly insecure in her job in recent weeks, as Mr. Trump repeatedly railed about the chaos at the border and vowed to move in a “tougher” direction. The president grew impatient with Ms. Nielsen’s insistence that federal law and international obligations limited her actions.

It’s no secret that Mr. Trump had a problem with Ms. Nielsen (right), whom he considered “weak” on matters of border security. The president and Stephen Miller, his hard-line immigration adviser, have long grumbled privately about the secretary’s insufficiently brutal approach to the surge in migrant families across the border. Last May, stories surfaced about Mr. Trump publicly berating her in front of the entire cabinet for failing to stop the crossings. Ms. Nielsen was said to have drafted a resignation letter at the time.

Alles (right) “has done a great job at the agency over the last two years, and the President is thankful for his over 40 years of service to the country,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement. “Mr. Alles will be leaving shortly and President Trump has selected James M. Murray, a career member of the USSS, to take over as director beginning in May.”

The departure of the Secret Service chief comes amid a broader shake-up in the Department of Homeland Security. On Sunday, Trump announced that Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen would be stepping down. Last week, Trump said he was rescinding his nomination of Ronald Vitiello to be director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying he wanted to go in a “tougher” direction. Both Alles and Vitiello reported to Nielsen.

Security protocols around Trump have come under scrutiny in recent days after an apparent security breach at the president’s Florida resort.

Secret Service agents arrested a Chinese woman after she gained access to the reception area of the Mar-a-Lago Club late last month, saying they found she was carrying two passports and a thumb drive containing malicious software, according to court documents. Prosecutors say the woman, Yujing Zhang, first approached a Mar-a-Lago security checkpoint March 30 and told security officials she was there to go to the swimming pool.

Management at Trump’s Palm Beach property, where individuals pay a fee to obtain memberships that can provide proximity to the president, allowed the woman to bypass security, prosecutors said. Zhang was ultimately stopped after a receptionist questioned her.

The Secret Service issued a statement after the woman was caught, appearing to lay blame for the security breach on management at Trump’s club. “The Secret Service does not determine who is invited or welcome at Mar-a-Lago; this is the responsibility of the host entity,” the agency said.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) released a statement Monday calling for Alles to testify before Congress concerning Mar-a-Lago and any security issues the president’s club poses, as well as other matters.

Washington Post, Grassley warns White House not to oust any more top immigration officials, Seung Min Kim, April 9, 2019. The most senior Senate Republican (shown at right) is warning the White House not to oust another top immigration official, making appeals to the administration against dismissing Lee Francis Cissna, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, amid a purge of Homeland Security leaders.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said he was “very, very concerned” regarding reports that Cissna could be next in a series of rapid-fire DHS dismissals that began late last week when the White House suddenly pulled the nomination of Ronald Vitiello, who had been tapped as director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Media News

Columbia Journalism Review, As election season heats up, two historic magazines get new faces, Jon Allsop, April 9, 2019. In recent months, with the 2020 election approaching fast, a bevy of major news organizations have made significant changes atop their mastheads. Adam Moss, the iconic, long-time editor of New York magazine, stepped down, and was replaced by David Haskell.

This week, John Harris, the founding editor in chief of Politico, made way; Matthew Kaminski, the site’s global editor, will replace him. Bill Keller, founding editor of The Marshall Project, is passing that site’s reins to Susan Chira. The LA Times, under new-ish owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, has staffed up impressively across the board; most recently, it added Shani Hilton, a top talent at BuzzFeed, as a deputy managing editor.

In the world of TV, CBS News appointed Susan Zirinsky as its new president, while the morning shows of CBS, ABC, and NBC all now have female executive producers — a first. Nancy Barnes, formerly of The Houston Chronicle, is settling into her new role as editorial director at NPR. The list goes on.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is stepping down as editor of The Nation after 25 years in the post. (She’ll stay on as publisher and editorial director, working on strategy and with “select writers.”) During her tenure, vanden Heuvel sought to style the progressive magazine as an “early journalistic alert system” — warning against the war in Iraq, corporate oligopolies, and the “Murdochization” of US media — and oversaw significant subscription growth during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump. D.D. Guttenplan, a long-standing presence at The Nation, will soon take over as editor.

Another new editor with 2020 on his mind is Chris Lehmann, who yesterday was named editor of The New Republic. (He comes from The Baffler, where he’ll remain an editor-at-large.) CJR’s Andrew McCormick spoke with Lehmann yesterday. “I want to approach the coming election cycle as what I think it will be: a convergence of social movements as opposed to a top-down, party-driven spectacle,” Lehmann says. “The parties are increasingly hollowed-out institutions that are unable to contain the activist energies within them in the way parties would like. That’s all good for journalism, because journalism is about conflict.”

Editors come and go for all sorts of reasons, but it’s usually best to get changes out of the way before a critical election season gets in full swing. The new crop of editors across our industry must all urgently grapple with campaign coverage that failed, in 2016, to serve readers consistent, substantive information on candidates’ ideas.

College Scammers Plead

New York Times, Felicity Huffman and 13 Others to Plead Guilty in Admissions Scandal, Kate Taylor, April 9, 2019 (print ed.). Felicity Huffman, the Hollywood actress, on Monday laid out a list of failings: Yes, she had paid a college counselor $15,000 to arrange for cheating on her daughter’s SAT test. And yes, it had backfired miserably, turning what Ms. Huffman said had been an effort to help her daughter into a betrayal of her.

“I am ashamed,” Ms. Huffman said, announcing that she will plead guilty to a federal crime, part of a sweeping investigation of college admissions fraud unveiled last month by prosecutors in Boston.

In the statement issued by Ms. Huffman (shown in her Twitter photo), she said she wanted to apologize to her family, friends and colleagues, and especially, she said, “to the students who work hard every day to get into college, and to their parents who make tremendous sacrifices to support their children and do so honestly.”

Ms. Huffman was one of 50 people charged in a sweeping investigation of college admissions fraud unveiled last month by federal prosecutors in Boston. On Monday, prosecutors said that 14 people — 13 parents and one coach — would plead guilty in the case. Dates for the formal pleas in court had yet to be set.

Actress Lori Loughlin (shown in a file photo), her designer husband, Mossimo Giannulli, and 14 other parents were charged Tuesday in a new indictment in the national college admissions scandal, prosecutors announced.

Sixteen parents allegedly involved in the scheme, which became a symbol of the influence of money on high-stakes college admissions, were charged in a second, superseding indictment with conspiring to commit fraud and money laundering. They had previously been charged in connection with what prosecutors have described as a scheme to fraudulently ease their children’s admission to selective colleges, using bribery to cheat on standardized exams and to falsely portray their children as athletic recruits.

The 16 defendants were arrested last month and are charged with conspiring with a college consultant, William “Rick” Singer, 58, of Newport Beach, Calif., and others, to bribe proctors of SAT and ACT college-entrance exams to allow another person to take the test in place of students, or to correct the students’ answers. The scheme also involved bribing coaches and athletic administrators to help get the children accepted at top universities as recruited athletes, prosecutors said.

Mueller Report

Roll Call, Mueller’s report could be out within a week, Barr says during hearing, Todd Ruger, April 9, 2019. The attorney general appeared in front of House Appropriations to discuss the Justice Department budget. Attorney General William Barr told lawmakers Tuesday that he will be in a position to release a version of the special counsel report “within a week,” with color-coded notes explaining why he redacted any information.

Barr, before an appropriations subcommittee, reiterated that he would withhold information from the report such as grand jury material or information that could reveal counterintelligence methods or interfere with ongoing prosecutions.

The uncertain prospect that the House Judiciary Committee will receive the raw, unredacted report generated by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III got even less certain Friday. A decision by the federal court of appeals in Washington now confronts the House leadership and Attorney General William P. Barr with some difficult political choices.

In a 2-to-1 decision in McKeever v. Barr, the court reaffirmed the principle of grand jury secrecy and concluded that a court has no “inherent power” to release grand jury information. This decision will give Barr a plausible basis to resist the Judiciary Committee’s subpoena of the entire Mueller report, even if the committee goes to court to enforce it. But both the House and the attorney general have ways to cope with this obstacle, if they have the political will and the professional judgment to do so.

In McKeever, two Republican appointees, including President Trump’s former deputy White House counsel, concluded that grand jury information must remain confidential unless a request for disclosure falls within one of the narrow exceptions listed in the federal rules of criminal procedure. The court refused to allow the disclosure of grand jury proceedings relating to the 1957 indictment of an FBI agent suspected of conspiring with the regime of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo to kidnap and murder an outspoken critic. Even though all the witnesses and principals died long ago, the court concluded that a historian writing a book about the incident could not get access to the grand jury proceedings.

In the face of Barr’s decision not to disclose any of the Mueller report to the public or even to the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D- N.Y., shown at right) until Barr and his team have scrubbed the report of grand jury information (and other material), Nadler and committee Democrats have authorized a subpoena for the full report, setting the stage for a court fight over the committee’s right to see grand jury information. Although the public need underlying the request for disclosure in McKeever was much less pressing, the decision in that case undermines the position of Nadler’s committee, because the controlling federal rule contains no exception allowing congressional “oversight” committees to demand access to otherwise secret grand jury proceedings.

One of us (Tribe) has supported investigation but resisted the call for impeachment hearings as such, defending House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in that regard, while the other (Lacovara) recently argued that Pelosi was duty-bound under the Constitution to have the House Judiciary Committee open a formal investigation into whether grounds for impeachment exist.

One reason for doing so was to enhance the likelihood that the committee could see the evidence that Mueller developed through the use of his investigating grand jury. During the Watergate investigation, the special prosecutor working with a grand jury developed a report detailing the evidence tending to show that President Richard M. Nixon had committed various federal crimes, including obstruction of justice, that might constitute grounds for impeachment.

One of the exceptions to grand jury secrecy is disclosure “preliminary to or in connection with a judicial proceeding.” To authorize disclosure of the Watergate grand jury information, the special prosecutor’s office argued that the House had authorized its Judiciary Committee to conduct a formal impeachment inquiry and that such an inquiry could be fairly analogized to a “grand jury” investigation and thus a judicial proceeding. Both the district court and the court of appeals agreed, and the Judiciary Committee obtained both the report and the underlying evidence. Significantly, the appeals court decision several days ago reaffirmed that exception. All three judges agreed that an impeachment inquiry falls within the “exception for judicial proceedings” and “coheres” with other rulings about the proper scope of grand jury secrecy.

Although at his rallies Trump delights his uninformed supporters with claims that he’s followed through on his campaign promises — The Wall — he is actually delivering very little.

Israeli Elections

Washington Post, Netanyahu and his chief rival both claim victory in squeaker of Israeli election, Loveday Morris and Ruth Eglash, April 9, 2019. After a bitter, roller-coaster campaign, Israelis went to bed Tuesday without a clear picture of whether longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could hold on to power in the face of corruption allegations and a strong challenger, but partial results suggested he would.

Both Netanyahu and his challenger Benny Gantz claimed victory in speeches to raucous crowds at their neighboring campaign headquarters in Tel Aviv.

Allison Mack (shown in a file photo) tearfully told a judge on Monday that she first joined the cultlike group known as Nxivm to “find purpose.” She was unsatisfied with her acting career, she said, despite her role on the successful television series “Smallville.”

Led by Keith Raniere, the group, based in Albany, billed itself as a self-help organization. It offered workshops and classes that promised participants greater self-fulfillment.

Ms. Mack became so involved, federal prosecutors said, that she began recruiting other women into a secret sect within Nxivm in which women were branded with Mr. Raniere’s initials and were forced to have sex with him.

“I was lost,” Ms. Mack said on Monday, while pleading guilty to racketeering and racketeering conspiracy charges related to her role in the group.

In a lengthy, tear-filled confession at Federal District Court in Brooklyn, Ms. Mack admitted to luring women into Nxivm (pronounced NEX-ee-um), where they were extorted and coerced into following Mr. Raniere’s orders.

“I must take full responsibility for my conduct,” Ms. Mack, 36, said.

The racketeering counts were among the least lurid ones that Ms. Mack faced. When the actress was arrested last year, she was also charged with sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and forced labor.

Her arrest was part of a larger federal case against high-ranking members of Nxivm, including Mr. Raniere and four others. Federal authorities had begun investigating the organization after The New York Times published an article in late 2017 detailing the inner workings of the secret sorority within Nxivm.

Ms. Mack’s Hollywood ties boosted the case’s profile and grabbed headlines. After prosecutors announced the charges against her, other actresses said that Ms. Mack had tried to get them to join her “women’s group.” Several female journalists also shared that they had received emails from Ms. Mack trying to pitch them on joining a female empowerment organization.

Prosecutors said the secret sect’s purpose within Nxivm was to groom sexual partners for Mr. Raniere, who is 58. It was called D.O.S., an acronym for a Latin phrase that roughly translates to “Lord/Master of the Obedient Female Companions,” court papers said.

In court on Monday, Ms. Mack admitted she recruited women into the group by telling them they were going to become members of a female mentorship program.

Ms. Mack said that to become members of the secret D.O.S. group, women were required to offer up “personally damaging or ruinous” information. The group also collected explicit photos and videos from members as well as rights to their properties, she said.

Prosecutors have said that the women were warned that the damaging or embarrassing information would be made public if they revealed the existence of the group.

Ms. Mack admitted on Monday that she wielded the information to blackmail the women into performing services for her and the group. The organization was set up to make women think “they could suffer serious harm” if they did not follow orders, she said.

The D.O.S. group was organized into circles of women “slaves” that were led by “masters,” prosecutors said. When Ms. Mack was arrested last year, officials said that she had recruited women into the society as “slaves” and had required them to have sex with Mr. Raniere.

Ms. Mack sobbed so much as she gave her statement that Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis interrupted to ask if she was all right. Ms. Mack then apologized to those that she hurt through her “misguided adherence to Keith Raniere’s teachings.”

Others charged in the case include Mr. Raniere and Clare Bronfman, an heiress to the Seagram’s liquor fortune.

Ms. Mack faces up to 20 years in prison on each count to which she pleaded guilty. She is scheduled to be sentenced in September.

Washington Post, ‘Kick Kavanaugh off campus’: Students decry George Mason’s decision to hire Supreme Court justice, Isaac Stanley-Becker, April 9, 2019. Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh will beat the Washington heat this summer and head for Runnymede, England, a bucolic borough 20 miles from London along the River Thames. At the site where the Magna Carta was sealed 804 years ago, laying the groundwork for constitutional democracy, the judge will teach a course on the origins of the U.S. Constitution to students at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School — 3,600 miles from the Arlington, Va., campus.

He will be joined in the English countryside by Jennifer Mascott, an assistant professor of law at George Mason. One of Kavanaugh’s former clerks on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Mascott came to his defense when his nomination was threatened last year by allegations of sexual misconduct, which he vehemently denied. “He has acted with the utmost character and integrity,” she told “PBS NewsHour.”

Some students at the university’s main campus in Fairfax City see matters differently. After news of his hire surfaced at the end of March in the undergraduate newspaper, the Fourth Estate, survivors of sexual assault mobilized to demand that he be terminated.

The judge (right), who was first nominated to the federal bench by President George W. Bush and to the nation’s top court by President Trump, used to teach at Harvard Law School. But administrators in Cambridge, Mass., informed students last fall that he had decided not to return this year to teach his course, “The Supreme Court Since 2005.” The announcement followed calls on Harvard, by hundreds of its students and alumni, to revoke his status as a lecturer.

The contest over Kavanaugh’s nomination became a flash point in the #MeToo movement, as well as an illustration of the polarization and distrust poisoning American politics. Now, the dispute at George Mason has become the latest front in the campus culture wars, reflecting broader upheaval over sexual violence, political correctness, free speech and sensitivity.

Freedom and Depression

Future of Freedom Foundation, Opinion: Denying Reality on Freedom, Jacob G. Hornberger, right, April 9, 2019. 23-year-old Olympic cyclist Kelly Catlin committed suicide last month. Apparently her despair stemmed from a concussion she suffered as well as from an obsessive drive for perfection that she had had since childhood.

As I read about her short life, however, I couldn’t help but think about the soaring suicide rate in America, especially among young people. According to the website of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States. In 2017, 47,173 Americans died by suicide, and estimated 1,400,000 attempted suicide.

That includes young people. “7.4 percent of youth in grades 9-12 reported that they had made at least one suicide attempt in the past 12 months. Female students attempted almost twice as often as male students (9.3% vs. 5.1%). Black students reported the highest rate of attempt (9.8%) with white students at 6.1 percent.”

Obviously, suicide is an extremely complex phenomenon, with different factors playing a role in each suicide and suicide attempt. Nonetheless, every time I hear about someone committing suicide, I can’t help but wonder whether the denial of reality by the American people when it comes to the concept of freedom has played a role in the person’s death.

Non-Profit Leader Blasts Trump

The Guardian, David Miliband: the most vulnerable pay for Trump's 'manufactured crisis,' Ed Pilkington, April 9, 2019. Exclusive: IRC chief says US government ‘failing in its most basic responsibilities’ in its handling of border issues. Donald Trump is manufacturing a crisis at the US-Mexico border to justify his hardline immigration plans while failing to tackle the real crisis in Central America that is the root of the problem, the head of one of the world’s largest humanitarian aid groups has said.

David Miliband (right), the former British foreign secretary who now leads the International Rescue Committee (IRC), issued a scathing critique of the Trump administration’s handling of border issues. “The US government is failing in its most basic responsibilities, never mind as a global leader but as a local example of how a civilized country should behave,” he said.

In an interview with the Guardian from IRC’s headquarters in New York, Miliband said that Trump’s approach to immigration amounted to “disorder by design”. “The administration needs to create the evidence to justify its immigration policies – it is using the concept of crisis to create the justification for government by executive fiat.”

The national emergency declared by the US president in February to bolster his plans for a border wall were denounced by Miliband as “manufactured crisis”. He said: “By no standards of national or international precedent would you describe it as a crisis, even in the communities affected in the southern US.”

Meanwhile, thousands of vulnerable people are suffering because of the removal of US protections, slow processing of their asylum claims and cuts in federal aid, he said. “The people who pay the price for government policy failure are the most vulnerable and least able to cope, whether Americans who are on the edge or Central Americans who are over the edge. That is a great danger.”

Founded in 1933 at the call of Albert Einstein, IRC today operates in more than 40 countries, including many war zones. Its global emergency team is currently working to control the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Inside DC

Wall Street On Parade, Wall Street Bank CEOs Head for Grilling Tomorrow on Capitol Hill, Pam Martens and Russ Martens, April 9, 2019. The Democrats are now in charge at the U.S. House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee and they’re proving that they’re not afraid to take on the legions of Wall Street lobbyists and lawyers in order to do their job for the American people. Tomorrow, Democrats on the Committee will be grilling the CEOs of seven of the largest Wall Street banks. The Republican Committee members, if history is any guide, will be lauding the bankers based on talking points delivered by the banks’ public relations and lobbying firms.

Democrats took over the House in January and Congresswoman Maxine Waters became the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee at that time. Waters has served on this Committee for the past 28 years – a period in which she has observed unending frauds against the investing public by the mega banks on Wall Street.

Set to appear at tomorrow’s hearing are the following mega bank CEOs: Michael Corbat of Citigroup; Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase; James Gorman of Morgan Stanley; Brian Moynihan of Bank of America; Ronald O’Hanley of State Street; Charles Scharf of Bank of New York Mellon; and David Solomon of Goldman Sachs.

In preparation for the hearing tomorrow, which begins at 9:00 a.m., the Committee released one of the most impressive memorandums that we have seen in many years. One particularly notable aspect of the memorandum is the amount of fines the mega banks (called G-SIBs or Global Systemically Important Banks) have paid over the past decade. According to the Committee:

“The U.S. G-SIBs, along with the rest of the banking sector, have made record profits in recent years. In 2018, the six largest U.S. banks made more than $111 billion in profits. However, these institutions have faced a long list of compliance breakdowns since the financial crisis. According to a 2018 report, financial institutions have paid at least $243 billion in fines since the financial crisis. U.S. G-SIBs accounted for roughly $167 billion, representing more than two-thirds of all fines since the financial crisis.”

Let that sink in for a moment.

According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, as of April 4 there were 5,369 federally-insured financial institutions in the U.S. There are only 8 U.S. G-SIBS responsible for two-thirds of all fines since the financial crisis.

We get taxed on how much we earn, taxed on what we eat, taxed on what we buy, taxed on where we go, taxed on what we drive, and taxed on how much is left of our assets when we die, and yet we have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used.

Case in point: Lawmakers across the country have been acting as fronts for corporations, sponsoring more than 10,000 model laws written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks such as the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Make no mistake: this is fascism disguised as legislative expediency.

As a recent investigative report by USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity points out, these copycat bills have been used to "override the will of local voters" and advance the agendas of the corporate state. "Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called 'model' bills get copied in one state Capitol after another, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them."

In this way, laws that promise to protect the public "actually bolster the corporate bottom line."

For example, "The Asbestos Transparency Act didn't help people exposed to asbestos. It was written by corporations who wanted to make it harder for victims to recoup money. The 'HOPE Act,' introduced in nine states, was written by a conservative advocacy group to make it more difficult for people to get food stamps."

Talk about Orwellian. So we have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn't prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn.

We're being forced to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, for misguided pork barrel projects that do little to enhance our lives, and for the trappings of a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

All the while the government continues to do whatever it likeslevy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsiblywith little thought for the plight of its citizens. If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation's finances, we'd all be in debtors' prison by now. Still, the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its money grabs.

April 8

9/11 Litigation

Guns & Butter, FBI Sued for Failure to Provide 9/11 Evidence to Congress, Host: Bonnie Fuller, April 8, 2019. Guests: David Meiswinkle, Mick Harrison, Barbara Honegger, Richard Gage from the Lawyers Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, Inc. The Lawyers Committee, along with Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth and 9/11 victim family members have filed a joint federal lawsuit against the US Department of Justice and the FBI for their failure to perform a congressionally mandated assessment of any evidence known to the FBI that was not considered by the 9/11 Commission related to any factors that contributed in any manner to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The guests provide a broad overview of both the lawsuit and the filing of a grand jury petition; the seven counts of relevant evidence included in the complaint which also cites the destruction by the FBI of evidence related to the "High Fivers."

U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray are the defendants in a lawsuit filed on March 25 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging the four federal government respondents failed to adhere to a 2014 mandate implemented by Congress.

The mandate, according to the suit, required the FBI and an external review body it created to implement what “ultimately became known” as the 9/11 Review Commission to “assess any evidence known to the FBI that was not considered by the 9/11 Commission related to any factors that contributed in any manner to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,” according to the lawsuit.

“The defendants failed to comply with this mandate from Congress in several ways, as reflected in the FBI 9/11 Review Commission’s Report, completed and released March 25, 2015,” the 44-page original petition says.

The mandate in question was a result of the 9/11 Commission’s acknowledgement that “additional evidence relating to the attacks would likely be brought forward after their report was issued."

“Over the 10 years that followed, significant additional evidence regarding the 9/11 attacks was in fact publicly reported, in some cases as a result of ongoing federal government inquiries, and in some cases as a result of ongoing inquiries by concerned citizens and nonprofit organizations,” the suit says.

Court documents explain that the 9/11 Review Commission noted in its report on page 100 that the FBI’s New York and San Diego field offices “have continued to investigate 9/11."

“The FBI’s 9/11 Review Commission in its Report at page 100 significantly notes that ‘The Review Commission found that the FBI, to its credit, still has the 9/11 attacks and any potential conspiracy surrounding them, under active investigation,’” the suit says.

The complaint additionally argues that “the FBI’s 9/11 Review Commission, and the FBI itself, failed to assess and report to Congress, as mandated, several other categories of significant 9/11-related evidence known to the FBI via reports in the press, via the web, and via public events and/or reflected in the FBI’s own records.”

The Lawyers’ Committee, a Pennsylvania nonprofit organization, says in the suit that it “believes that the family members of the victims of the tragic crimes of 9/11 have a compelling right to know the full truth of what happened to their loved ones on 9/11, and that Congress and the Department of Justice, in order to do their jobs, have a compelling need to know.”

AE echoes the Lawyers’ Committee’s sentiments by stating that the “investigation and education of the public as to the true reasons these [World Trade Center] buildings collapsed on 9/11 [is] an important organizational interest distinct from the general public interest in seeing government agencies comply with the law.”

The nonprofits are joined in the litigation by Robert McIlvaine. McIlvaine’s son, Bobby, was killed in the attacks on New York.

Mark G. Harrison, of Bloomington, Ind., and John M. Clifford with the law firm Clifford & Garde, LLP, of Washington, D.C., are representing the complainants.

U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Case No. 1-19-CV-0824

Donald Trump is also firing Secret Service Director Randolph “Tex” Alles, according to CNN, and Deputy Homeland Security Director Claire Grady, according to NBC News. This comes after Trump withdrew his own ICE Director nominee Ron Vitiello. What do these three people have in common? They all answered directly to Kirstjen Nielsen at DHS. Not only is Trump ridding himself of Nielsen, he’s ridding himself of anyone who was aligned with her. So what’s he really up to?

Nielsen obviously had no problem with kidnapping immigrant kids from their parents and leaving them to die in cages. But in the hours since her departure, multiple major news outlets have reported that Trump was increasingly pushing her to do things that she considered illegal. She was frustrated by it, and he was frustrated by her unwillingness to do it. Nielsen already belongs in prison for negligently getting those kids killed. Whatever else Trump was pushing her to do, it must have been something even worse than killing kids.

Trump's Tax Stonewall

New York Times, To Get Trump’s Tax Returns, N.Y. Democrats Try a New Strategy, Jesse McKinley, April 8, 2019 (print ed.). A new bill would allow New York officials to release Mr. Trump’s state tax returns to congressional committees. In an attempt to work around the White House, Democratic lawmakers in Albany are trying to do what their federal counterparts have so far failed to accomplish: to obtain President Trump’s tax returns.

Albany lawmakers are seeking state tax returns, not the federal ones at the heart of the current standoff in Washington. But a tax return from New York — the president’s home state, and the headquarters of his business empire — could likely contain much of the same financial information as a federal return.

Under a bill that is scheduled to be introduced this week, the commissioner of the New York Department of Taxation and Finance would be permitted to release any state tax return requested by leaders of three congressional committees for any “specific and legitimate legislative purpose.”

The bill is the most recent proposal from New York lawmakers trying to cast light on the president’s personal finances and business dealings, but it could also open the Democratic majorities in the Legislature to charges of politicizing state law to embarrass the president ahead of his expected re-election campaign.

State Senator Brad Hoylman, a Manhattan Democrat who is sponsoring the legislation, defended the bill, saying it is designed to be “a safety valve for any attempt by the White House to block the Congress from doing this at the federal level.”

The bill’s expected introduction on Monday comes even as the I.R.S. and Treasury Department in Washington are deciding whether to comply with a request last week from the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, for access under a provision of the federal tax code to six years of his federal returns by April 10.

Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer called the effort by Mr. Neal a “gross abuse of power” — an opinion that was seconded by the White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney (left), who said on Sunday that Democrats would “never” see the president’s tax returns. It remains unclear if the federal tax collecting agencies will share that view.

More On U.S. Taxes

Roll Call, Opinion: If your taxes are a complicated mess, you’re not alone, Jason J. Fichtner, Apr 8, 2019. Americans spend too much time, money and energy each year trying to understand and follow the tax code. The total economic loss (the costs of complying, lobbying and changed behavior) from the tax code may be up to a trillion dollars per year. And that was before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 caused new confusion for many filers.

Proposals for new wealth taxes, changes to marginal tax rates, or adjusting the estate tax capture the imagination of policy wonks. But such discussions often overlook the most important aspect of these policies — how the tax code is administered.

In practice, these administrative issues could make or break any attempt at reform, as well as the tax code as a whole. In a new paper for the Bipartisan Policy Center released today, Bill Gale, Jeff Trinca and I point to three fundamental issues with our tax system.

First, our tax system is too costly to comply with. Americans spend too much time, money and energy each year trying to understand and follow the tax code. By my estimate, the total economic loss (the costs of complying, lobbying and changed behavior) from the tax code may be up to a trillion dollars per year. This estimate was before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which has caused new confusion for many filers and may have made the code more complex.

Second, compliance is especially hard for filers claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit, an effective pro-work and anti-poverty program that I’ve advocated for improving. The EITC has a web of complex eligibility rules that can be hard for potential claimants to navigate and prove that they meet. How would you go about proving to the IRS, for example, that your child lived with you for at least six months last year?

Furthermore, lax oversight allows some fringe tax preparers to prey on low-income filers, which drives a significant share of improper EITC payments and can lead to penalties for the filer.

Third, it is too easy for some filers to evade their taxes. The most recent estimate, for 2008-2010, is that about $406 billion in taxes each year goes uncollected. Tax fraud crops up in cases like the recent college admissions scandal, contributing to Americans’ general sense that loopholes and offshore accounts make it too easy for some taxpayers to wriggle out of what they owe. Ultimately, this shortfall must be made up for by those of us who do pay our taxes.Overworked and underfunded

One underlying cause of all three issues is that Congress has chronically underfunded the IRS, reducing their budget by more than 15 percent since 2010. While to some this may sound like good politics, a lack of staff and resources hinders the agency’s ability to catch tax cheats and to provide taxpayers with high levels of support, resulting in longer telephone wait times for taxpayers seeking assistance and only 0.5 percent of all returns audited in 2016.

Former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen estimates that up to 40 percent of the IRS workforce could retire this year, which will only further diminish the agency’s institutional knowledge and ability.

The document outlines covert false flag operations and a possible Israeli invasion, Lebanese TV station, Al-Jadeed reported. According to the report, the source of the document is Israeli and it was created in partnership with the US, it is unclear who exactly presented it to President Aoun.

The document presents an alleged US plan to splinter the Lebanese Internal Security Forces (ISF), a domestic institution separated from the Lebanese Army. This would be carried out by an $200 million investment in the ISF. The money would be “disguised” as a means to keep peace, but $2.5 million would be specifically designated to create a conflict against Hezbollah.

The document states the ultimate goal is to destabilize the country by creating a civil war in Lebanon which will “help Israel on the international scene.” The United States and Israel plan to accomplish this by supporting “democratic forces.” If that sounds familiar, its because it is currently happening in Venezuela (or is rather about to possibly happen) and is actively still happening in Syria and Libya.

Separately, during his visit Mike Pompeo (shown above right) gave Michel Aoun an ultimatum: to contain Hezbollah or face consequences. The Lebanese government isn’t sure how to deliver on Pompeo’s wishes. It can neither take on Hezbollah militarily nor stop it from accessing its share of government resources. According to Aoun, Hezbollah scored two-thirds of Shiite votes in the last elections.

U.S. Claim Against Iran

Washington Post, Trump plans to designate Iranian military unit as a terrorist group, Anne Gearan and Carol Morello, April 8, 2019. Trump called the IRGC “the Iranian government’s primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign.” U.S. officials have long said that the group’s opaque structure and responsibilities provided a mask for terrorist activities that threaten Israelis, Europeans and U.S. forces.

The new State Department designation “underscores the fact that Iran’s actions are fundamentally different from those of other governments,” Trump’s statement said.

This action will significantly expand the scope and scale of our maximum pressure on the Iranian regime. It makes crystal clear the risks of conducting business with, or providing support to, the IRGC. If you are doing business with the IRGC, you will be bankrolling terrorism.”

The action has been debated for years, including a renewed consideration last year that included warnings from Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and others about the potential for backlash.

The IRGC is a military unit originally set up as security for Iran’s clerical rulers. It has grown to be the country’s most powerful security organization, with nearly unchecked political influence and interests in business, real estate and other areas of the economy. The United States blames the IRGC for facilitating U.S. service member deaths in Iraq and elsewhere, via financing, training and weapons support to terrorist networks.

Venezuela

Foreign Policy, Opinion: U.S. Military Wary of China’s Foothold in Venezuela, Lara Seligman, April 8, 2019. The head of U.S. Southern Command says Beijing is using disinformation and debt diplomacy to dig in as Maduro clings to power. As U.S. President Donald Trump’s national security team mulls a military intervention to oust Venezuela’s strongman president, Nicolás Maduro, the Pentagon is watching China’s commercial and financial creep in the crisis-gripped nation with growing alarm.

In an interview with Foreign Policy, Adm. Craig Faller, the four-star military officer who heads U.S. Southern Command, pointed to a Chinese disinformation campaign designed to blame the United States for the devastating blackouts that devastated Venezuela in recent weeks.

Maduro, whose government is backed by China, Russia, and Cuba, has himself publicly accused the U.S. Defense Department of causing the blackouts. Following the power failures, Beijing offered to help the Venezuelan government restore its grid.

“China came out publicly, a state spokesman, implying the blackouts were attributable to U.S. cyberattacks,” Faller said during a recent trip to Washington, D.C. “That is just such a blatant lie. The blackouts are attributed to Maduro’s inept leadership, corruption, inattention to his people, and lack of concern for any humanity.”

The Pentagon is worried about China in other arenas as well. In the Pacific, China is building up its military capability, intimidating its smaller neighbors, and threatening Taiwan. In Africa, Beijing is using debt diplomacy to gain control of crucial ports and other infrastructure. And in Europe, the Trump administration is pushing NATO to address potential Chinese cyberthreats and commercial threats.

“I think the biggest threat to democracy and the way of life around the world is the trend that we see in China,” Faller said.

He said China was trying to assert economic control in Venezuela by investing in infrastructure and providing hefty loans that Caracas would have difficulty paying back. Much of Beijing’s financial interest in Venezuela is tied to loans-for-oil deals struck between the two countries in 2007. By 2014, the China Development Bank had provided Venezuela with more than $30 billion in loans tied to oil production.

More On U.S. Border Policy

New York Times, Opinion: Cancel Kirstjen Nielsen, Michelle Goldberg, Her role in terrorizing children should make her a permanent pariah. April 8, 2019. On Sunday evening, news broke that Kirstjen Nielsen (right) was leaving her job as head of the Department of Homeland Security. The New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted that according to people close to Nielsen, one reason she hung on as long as she did was because “she was aware how awful life would/will be for her on the outside,” given her role in defending Donald Trump’s policies.

Let’s make it so.

Nielsen did not create Trump’s monstrous policy of separating migrant families, but she should be known forever as the person who carried it out. She put babies in cages, traumatized children for life, and then appears to have lied to Congress about what she had done. She did this evil work with either blithe incompetence or malicious sloppiness, failing to create a system to properly track kids who were ripped from their families. On Friday, the Trump administration said it could take up to two years to identify thousands of separated migrant children.

April 7

Trump Probes

Palmer Report, Opinion: Robert Mueller’s real endgame for Donald Trump, Bill Palmer, April 7, 2019. For as long as Special Counsel Robert Mueller was investigating Donald Trump, we pointed out that Mueller surely didn’t come out of retirement and go to the trouble of spending two years investigating an illegitimate criminal president, just to hand in a book report and go home. Yet, when Mueller first turned in his report, it appeared that was precisely what he had done.

In the two weeks since, a few things have become clear. For instance, Robert Mueller obviously found a metric ton of criminal dirt on Donald Trump. We know this because of what Trump and his associates have directly confessed to, what the media has dug up, and what Mueller’s team told us this week.

Also, Robert Mueller clearly wasn’t done with his investigation when he abruptly turned in his report and disbanded his team. We’re now seeing U.S. Attorneys pick up various threads of the Mueller probe, from the inevitable superseding indictment against Roger Stone, to the grand jury proceedings involving the foreign government owned mystery company. The question is whether Mueller quit voluntarily.

There’s one big thing to watch. Robert Mueller is still technically employed as Special Counsel. On Friday, Mueller’s office announced that his employment will officially be off the job within a few days. Once Mueller is no longer working for the DOJ, he should immediately have more freedom to get his message out there. Mueller follows the rules, but when you look at his past history of prosecutions, he usually goes with the most aggressive possible interpretation of the rules.

A federal judge had asked for a plan to identify these children and their families after a report from government inspectors in January revealed that the Trump administration most likely separated thousands more children from their parents than was previously believed.

These families were separated before the administration unveiled its “zero-tolerance” immigration policy in the spring of 2018, when nearly all adults entering the country illegally were prosecuted and any children accompanying them were put into shelters or foster care.

To identify these families, the government said it would apply a statistical analysis to about 47,000 children who were referred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement and subsequently discharged, according to the court filing. From there, the government said it would manually review the case records of the children who appeared to have the highest probability of being part of the separated families.

Axios Sneak Peek, Kirstjen Nielsen out at Homeland, Jonathan Swan, April 7, 2019. Because it's Donald Trump's Washington, the news arrived via Twitter at 6:02 pm ET, broken across two tweets: "Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen (right) will be leaving her position, and I would like to thank her for her service....I am pleased to announce that Kevin McAleenan, the current U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner, will become Acting Secretary for @DHSgov. I have confidence that Kevin will do a great job!"

Between the lines: CBS' Paula Reid reported about an hour ago that Nielsen is "expected to resign" in her meeting with Trump tonight, but Trump's ambiguous wording reflects the predictably messy end to this relationship, which was formalized in a meeting in the White House residence, according to a senior White House official.

• Trump has wanted Nielsen gone for months because he believes she's "weak" on immigration, per multiple sources with direct knowledge of the president's thinking.

• "The president has been right all along about the crisis on the border," said a senior White House official, characterizing Trump's thinking. "He didn't think she was getting the job done. ... He asked for her resignation and she gave it to him."

In a letter to Trump, provided by an administration source, Nielsen wrote:

• "Despite our progress in reforming homeland security for a new age, I have determined that it is the right time for me to step aside," effective Sunday.

A source close to DHS tells Mike Allen that tonight's meeting amounted to a showdown: "Frustrations were building on both sides."

• "She was undercut at every turn," the source said. "She's done everything she can do. The White House is eating their own."

Palmer Report, Opinion: Nancy Pelosi slam dunks Donald Trump over Kirstjen Nielsen debacle, Bill Palmer, April 7, 2019. Just how deranged of an anti-immigrant extremist do you have to be for someone like Kirstjen Nielsen, who has been kidnapping immigrant children and locking them in cages, to decide that you’re too much of an extremist? That’s the question that Donald Trump is now facing in the wake of Nielsen’s departure. It turns out Speaker Nancy Pelosi has the answer.

Kirstjen Nielsen felt that Donald Trump has become “increasingly unhinged” about immigration, according to a CNN report. This ostensibly means that Trump is now looking to do something to immigrants that’s even more evil than stealing kids and putting them in concentration camps. Now that Nielsen is out, we can surely expect House Democrats to call on her to publicly testify about why she left, and what Trump is truly planning.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi quickly released a statement after news surfaced about the details of Nielsen’s exit. Pelosi said precisely what most Americans are thinking right now: “It is deeply alarming that the Trump Administration official who put children in cages is reportedly resigning because she is not extreme enough for the White House’s liking. The President’s dangerous and cruel anti-immigrant policies have only worsened the humanitarian suffering at the border and inflicted vast suffering on the families who have been torn apart.”

Nancy Pelosi continued: “The Trump Administration’s increasingly toxic anti-immigrant policies were resoundingly rejected by the American people in the midterm election. America needs a Homeland Security Secretary who will respect the sanctity of families, honor our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants, and restore sanity to this Administration’s policies.”

The Homeland Security and Labor departments plan to grant an additional 30,000 H-2B visas this summer on top of the 33,000 they had already planned to give out, the agencies confirmed.

The H-2B visa allows foreign workers to come to the United States legally and work for several months at companies such as landscapers, amusement parks or hotels. About 80 percent of these visas went to people from Mexico and Central America last year, government data shows.

Trump says there is a national emergency at the southern border because too many people are trying to come to the United States illegally or to seek asylum. On Friday, he implored migrants to turn around and go home.

“Can’t take you anymore,” Trump said, while standing at the border in California. “Our country is full.” But his administration is sending a different message to some short-term workers. With the additional visas, the Trump administration is on track to grant 96,000 H-2B visas this fiscal year, the most since 2007, when George W. Bush was president.

U.S. Politics

After touring poor areas of his state, South Carolina Sen. Fritz Hollings said in the Senate, “We’ve got work to do in our own backyard, just as anybody who’s candid knows he has work in his own backyard, and I’d rather clean it up than cover it up.”

Like his colleague Strom Thurmond, South Carolina’s senior senator, Mr. Hollings became governor, ran for president and was a revered populist who took care of the military, business interests and the folks back home.

Together, they were the nation’s longest-serving Senate pair from one state. When Mr. Thurmond died in 2003 at 100, he had been the Senate’s longest-tenured member after 48 years in office. Moreover, Mr. Hollings was junior senator for 36 years, itself a record, and his tenure of 38 years and 55 days, including more than two years fulfilling the term of a senator who died in office, made him the eighth longest-serving senator.

Mr. Thurmond, a Democrat who switched to the Republican Party, never relented in his opposition to full equality for black Americans. Mr. Hollings, while remaining a fiscal conservative, evolved into a social moderate, riding winds of change that swept the South as proponents of civil rights won court cases, staged protests and endured brutalities that shocked the nation’s conscience.

U.S. Allies vs. Human Rights?

Washington Post, Commentary: For a decades-old massacre in Guatemala, justice neared. Now it’s retreating, Maggie Jones, April 7, 2019. A few years ago, deep in Guatemala’s Highlands, where mist enshrouds the green hills, Francisco Caal Jalal told me about a long-ago massacre in his village, Pambach. It happened one June evening in 1982. Soldiers lined up about 70 blindfolded men and boys, face down, then beat, stabbed and hacked them with machetes. Caal Jalal was lying at the end of the line when a soldier brought a machete down on his head and his neck, again and again.

Associated Press via Washington Post, Netanyahu vows to annex West Bank settlements if re-elected, Karin Laub, April 7, 2019. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged Saturday to annex Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank if re-elected, a dramatic policy shift apparently aimed at rallying his nationalist base in the final stretch of the tight race.

Netanyahu (right) has promoted Jewish settlement expansion in his four terms as prime minister, but until now refrained from presenting a detailed vision for the West Bank, seen by the Palestinians as the heartland of a future state.

An Israeli annexation of large parts of the West Bank is bound to snuff out any last flicker of hope for an Israeli-Palestinian deal on the terms of a Palestinian state on lands Israel captured in 1967.

A so-called two-state solution has long been the preferred option of most of the international community. However, intermittent U.S. mediation between Israelis and Palestinians ran aground after President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital early in his term. The Palestinians, who seek Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem as their capital, suspended contact with the U.S.

Washington Post, Opinion: In a book proposal, Khashoggi outlined a U.S.-inspired vision for a new Saudi Arabia, David B. Ottaway, April 7, 2019 (print ed.). David Ottaway is a fellow in the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center. Jamal Khashoggi (right) was working on what he described as an “eye-opener” of a book challenging Saudi Arabia to draw inspiration for its reforms from American institutions and practices when he was savagely murdered inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in October. His book proposal illustrates that he was as much a visionary of a new Saudi Arabia as Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, author of the highly ambitious “Vision 2030” and the person who the CIA concluded ordered Khashoggi’s assassination.

Khashoggi’s gruesome murder touched off the worst crisis in U.S.-Saudi relations since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with Congress pressing President Trump to name the instigator and to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

The crown prince (left) tried to convince the White House that Khashoggi was a dangerous Islamist threat to the United States, but his book project reveals just the opposite: He was a great admirer of U.S. democracy and society. He had belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth but had long since disassociated himself from what Saudi authorities have branded a terrorist organization.

Khashoggi’s book project was outlined in his application for a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, submitted in June 2017. His daughter, Noha, recently agreed to allow me to disclose its content. His book was to be both a primer for Saudis coming to the United States, explaining how American institutions and practices function, and a plea for Saudi leaders to adopt many of them.

Its tentative title: United States for Saudis or U.S. Made Easy for Saudis.

“My plan is to explain American life to the Saudi reader and Arabs in general in a simple storytelling format,” he wrote, noting that at least 750,000 Saudis are graduates of American education institutions, and even more have come as tourists or family members of students. ”My focus will be on the schooling, educational reform [and] control of public funds,” he wrote.

Consumer Rights, Protections

New York Times, Opinion: It’s Your iPhone. Why Can’t You Fix It Yourself? Editorial Board, April 6, 2019. When the tools of modern life stop working, people should be able to shop for the best price on repairs. A giant John Deere tractor and a pocket-size Apple iPhone have something important in common: The cost of repairing either one is too high.

The two companies, and many of their peers, use a variety of aggressive tactics, including electronic locks and restrictive warranties, to push customers with broken equipment to seek help from their authorized repair facilities — or to give up and buy a replacement.

This is unfair to consumers who might be able to obtain, or perform, lower-priced repairs. It’s unfair to independent businesses that might do the work. And it’s bad for the environment, because the high cost of repairs leads people to toss devices that might have been fixed.

Late last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, proposed a national right-to-repair law for farm equipment. The idea is based on a 2012 Massachusetts law that requires carmakers to provide the information necessary to perform repairs and to sell any special tools needed to do the work. The law also phased in a requirement that new cars be compatible with generic diagnostic tools.

Ms. Warren has the right idea, but she did not go far enough. The owners of consumer electronic products deserve the same protection as farmers.

The potential savings are considerable. A 2011 study found that customers who used independent auto repair shops spent about 24 percent less on repairs each year. Similarly, Apple charges $279 to fix the screen of an iPhone X, while a repair store in downtown Washington, D.C., quoted a price of $219 — although the lack of Apple support makes such repairs riskier.

“Right-to-repair” is a bit of a misnomer. The owner of a device generally has the legal right to repair it. The issue is whether the manufacturer allows people and independent businesses to obtain the necessary information, tools and parts to do the repairs.

Actions by federal regulators and Republicans in Congress over the past two years have paved the way for banks and other financial companies to issue more than $1 trillion in risky corporate loans, sparking fears that Washington and Wall Street are repeating the mistakes made before the financial crisis.

The moves undercut policies put in place by banking regulators six years ago that aimed to prevent high-risk lending from once again damaging the economy.

Now, regulators and even White House officials are struggling to comprehend the scope and potential dangers of the massive pool of credits, known as leveraged loans, they helped create.

Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and other financial companies have originated these loans to hundreds of cash-strapped companies, many of which could be unable to repay if the economy slows or interest rates rise.

Libyan Civil War Expands

New York Times, U.S. Military Pulls Out of Libyan Capital as Rival Militias Battle, David D. Kirkpatrick, April 7, 2019. The United States military evacuated its small contingent of troops from the Libyan capital on Sunday as rival militias raced to stop the forces of an aspiring strongman, Gen. Khalifa Hifter, from taking control of the city.

Forces under the command of General Hifter made a surprise advance on the outskirts of the capital, Tripoli, on Thursday, setting up a battle with a coalition of armed factions from the region around the city — the grand prize in a chaotic eight-year fight for control after the ouster of the dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi during the Arab Spring revolts.

Tripoli is the northern African country’s financial hub, receiving the income from the sales of Libyan oil, housing the central bank, and paying the salaries of soldiers and public employees across the country.

By Sunday morning, both sides had begun attacking from the air, using the small and primitive air forces at their command, but the exact targets and extent of the damage could not be immediately determined.

April 6

Trump Defies Tax Disclosure Law

New York Times, Trump Lawyer Tells Treasury Not to Give Democrats Tax Returns, Nicholas Fandos and Maggie Haberman, April 6, 2019 (print ed.). President Trump’s personal lawyer on Friday asserted Mr. Trump’s right as a citizen to keep his tax returns private and told the Treasury Department not to hand the returns over to House Democrats, foreshadowing what has the potential to be a far-reaching legal fight that could reach the Supreme Court.

The lawyer, William S. Consovoy, argued that Democrats who have demanded to see Mr. Trump’s tax information had no legitimate legislative reason to request it and that Representative Richard E. Neal’s decision this week to ask for six years of the president’s personal and business returns flouts “fundamental constitutional constraints.” He also called it a “gross abuse of power.”

Mr. Consovoy’s views have no direct bearing on the case. The little known tax code provision employed by the Democrats in demanding Mr. Trump’s returns says only that the Internal Revenue Service “shall furnish” the information, giving it and its parent agency, the Treasury Department, little leeway in deciding how to respond.

Trump's Banking Controversies

New York Times, Trump Says Fed Should Cut Rates and Lift Economy, Jim Tankersley, April 6, 2019 (print ed.). President Trump on Friday called on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates and take additional steps to stimulate economic growth, his latest attempt to put the traditionally independent central bank under his thumb.

Speaking to reporters before traveling to the southwestern border, the president once again criticized the Fed’s interest rate increases in 2018, saying “they really slowed us down.” Mr. Trump, who is presiding over one of the longest sustained economic expansions in United States history, also said the Fed should do more to give the economy a lift — including resuming a stimulus program that he opposed when it began under President Barack Obama.

New York Times, Sexual misconduct claims against Herman Cain, Mr. Trump’s pick for the Fed’s board, are causing anxiety for the G.O.P., Alan Rappeport and Kenneth P. Vogel, April 6, 2019 (print ed.). Payments to women who complained of sexual harassment. Accusations of groping. Allegations of a 13-year extramarital affair. President Trump moves ahead with his plan to nominate Herman Cain, right, a 2012 Republican presidential candidate, for a seat on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, Republican lawmakers are being forced to confront a fresh round of uncomfortable allegations of sexual misconduct against women as the 2020 campaign begins.

A day after Mr. Trump made the choice of Mr. Cain official, Senate Republicans expressed quiet anxiety over the prospect of another #MeToo minefield even as the White House exalted the decision.

“President Trump’s statement that Herman Cain is ‘a truly outstanding individual’ is a message that the president of the United States is willing to ignore the allegations of a number of women who alleged that Herman Cain either sexually harassed them or had an affair with them,” said Gloria Allred, left, a lawyer who represented two of Mr. Cain’s accusers. “This message is an insult to women and should be condemned by the Republican Party and all those who care about respect and dignity for women.”

The choice of Mr. Cain comes as Mr. Trump’s other pick to fill an open seat on the seven-member Fed board, the conservative economist Stephen Moore, has been under fire for ethical and financial lapses that emerged from his divorce records. In both cases, the White House has publicly backed Mr. Trump’s selections despite criticism that he was installing loyalists with questionable credentials in two of the country’s top economic policy jobs.

Mueller Report Release

WhoWhatWhy, Decision Limits Judicial Discretion To Release Grand Jury Materials, Celia Wexler, April 6, 2019. Friday’s decision by the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit appears to sharply limit the discretion of judges to order disclosure of any grand jury materials, which might result in a highly redacted public document. In a 2-to-1 decision in McKeever v. Barr, judges ruled that a court can reveal grand jury materials only if they meet specific exemptions in the law; those exemptions include disclosure to another grand jury, to a state prosecutor, or to the intelligence community.

As recently as 2016, another appellate court had come to a different conclusion. Three years ago, the US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit held that the court had the authority to disclose grand jury materials, having the power to balance the need for secrecy against compelling “policy interests,” said Barbara McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor and former US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.

McQuade and Andrew Wright, former associate counsel to President Barack Obama, participated in a webinar on the Mueller memo Friday afternoon sponsored by the American Constitution Society (ACS) and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

While Friday’s decision might make it harder for a federal court to disclose details of the Mueller investigation, McQuade noted that the DC Circuit also cited another decision that could continue to make it possible for the House Judiciary Committee to see the grand jury material in the Mueller report.

Haldeman v. Sirica was issued in 1974, at the time of the Watergate scandal. The court held that it was lawful for the House Judiciary Committee to receive grand jury material. Under legal rules governing the disclosure of grand jury information, McQuade said, grand jury materials may be shared with another grand jury, or in connection with another judicial proceeding. During Watergate, the House Judiciary Committee was “acting as a grand jury in an impeachment proceeding,” McQuade said.

She said that the same exemption should apply to the current House Judiciary Committee. Asked by WhoWhatWhy whether the committee would have to vote to impeach for that exemption to apply, McQuade said an impeachment vote would not be necessary. Since House Judiciary has the “responsibility to impeach,” it would need access to the materials before making that judgment, she said.

Israeli Election Tuesday

Washington Post, Israel’s Netanyahu, a political Houdini, is facing his toughest escape act yet, Loveday Morris and Ruth Eglash, April 6, 2019 (print ed.).Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, has escaped many a peril in the quarter-century that he has been a dominant figure in Israeli politics. But the latest corruption cases have overshadowed this year’s election campaign and left Israelis wondering whether he could be caught in that last shackle.

Daily Beast, ‘No Celebrities’: Embarrassing Turnout at Trump’s Beverly Hills Fundraiser, Tarpley Hitt, April 6, 2019. Tickets for the event allegedly started at $15,000 and went as high as $150,000. Late Friday afternoon, Donald Trump landed in Los Angeles for a re-election fundraiser. The event was organized by Trump Victory, a fundraising partnership between the Republican National Convention and Trump’s campaign, and aimed to raise an estimated $5 million for the party. It was the president’s third visit to the celebrity-hub city and, by all accounts, not a star-studded one.

“Celebrities? No celebrities,” Rabbi Marvin Hier said of the event. Hier is the dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and gave the prayer at Trump’s inauguration. Multiple valets in royal blue jackets, who declined to give their names because of their job, echoed his sentiment.

The event was held in the 22,000-square-foot Beverly Hills home of health-care executive and GOP donor Lee Samson. The 15-bathroom “Italian-style limestone villa” runs about $10 million, according to Zillow, and was named Robb Report’s Ultimate Home of the Year in 2012. Tickets started at $15,000 for dinner, $50,000 for a photo op with Trump, and $150,000 to join his roundtable discussion, according to an invitation obtained by the City News Service. Fundraisers had estimated that some 90 donors would be in attendance, but did not disclose the invite list.

April 5

Flight Safety

New York Times, Pilots of Doomed Flight Followed Boeing Safety Procedures, Report Details, Hadra Ahmed, Hannah Beech and James Glanz, April 5, 2019 (print ed.). Pilots on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 followed procedures recommended by Boeing but were still unable to prevent a crash, investigators said. Sensor readings varied wildly and affected the pilots’ understanding of factors like the plane’s pitch and airspeed, according to the initial findings.

Just two minutes after takeoff, the captain of the doomed Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 said the plane was having problems. Pilots then began having trouble controlling the aircraft.

In the plane’s short and fatal flight, pilots followed safety procedures recommended by Boeing, performing actions on the emergency checklist, including cutting off electricity to an automatic system that was pushing the nose down. But they were still unable to prevent the jet from crashing, according to an initial report by Ethiopian investigators.

About six minutes after takeoff, the plane went into a fatal dive that killed all 157 people on board.

The report, released Thursday, laid out a timeline of the flight based on analysis from 18 Ethiopian and international investigators and information from the jet’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. The investigators’ initial report was released several hours after a news conference held by Ethiopia’s minister of transportation.

The data showed that shortly after liftoff, a crucial sensor, called an angle of attack sensor, began fluctuating wildly on the pilot’s side, falsely indicating that the plane was close to stalling. Eventually, those false readings activated the automated system known as MCAS, intended to prevent a stall.

Seventeen-and-a-half years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and a decade after President Barack Obama ordered the C.I.A. to dismantle any remnants of its global prison network, the military commission system is still wrestling with how to handle evidence of what the United States did to the Qaeda suspects it held at C.I.A. black sites. While the topic of torture can now be discussed in open court, there is still a dispute about how evidence of it can be gathered and used in the proceedings at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

By law, prosecutors cannot use evidence gained through torture — or any other involuntary statements — at the war court, where eight of Guantánamo’s 40 prisoners are accused of being complicit in terrorist attacks. Prosecutors have made clear that nothing the defendants said at the black sites will be used as evidence.

The exchange at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing marked the first time Acosta has been questioned publicly about the case since a judge ruled in February that the 2008 arrangement he oversaw as a U.S. attorney in South Florida had broken the law because his office failed to properly notify victims.

“You chose wealthy and well-connected people, child rapists, over the victims in this case,” said Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-Mass., shown on her Twitter photo), who noted that “the hideous truth has come out” about Acosta’s role in the case.

Clark cited the Epstein case as she questioned Acosta on his department’s decision to propose cutting the budget for one of its divisions tasked with combating human trafficking from $68 million to $18.5 million.

“This isn’t the first time you have ignored human trafficking,” Clark said. “If you as U.S. attorney could not fight for these girls, how, as secretary of labor, can you tell this panel and the American people that you can responsibly oversee this budget [and] the Department of Labor, including human trafficking?”

Acosta responded that human trafficking is “an in­cred­ibly important issue” and said the Justice Department had long defended the plea deal.

“Epstein was incarcerated,” Acosta said. “He registered as a sex offender. The world was put on notice that he was a sex offender, and the victims received restitution.”

The 2008 plea deal stemmed from a federal investigation of Epstein (right) focused on alleged sex trafficking and molestation of dozens of underage girls. Before the deal, prosecutors drafted a 53-page federal indictment that included sex trafficking charges, which could have placed Epstein in prison for life.

Epstein’s plea agreement allowed him to instead plead guilty to two state felony solicitation charges, casting the victims as prostitutes. The deal led to a 13-month stay in county jail during which Epstein was allowed to leave custody six days a week, 12 hours a day, for work.

Acosta, 50, has received support from his boss, President Trump, who in February called him a “fantastic labor secretary.” On Wednesday, Acosta argued that Epstein would have faced even lighter punishment had the plea deal not been struck.

“I understand the frustration,” he said. “I think it’s important for people to know he was going to get off with no jail time or restitution. It was the work of our office that resulted in him going to jail. It was the work of our office that resulted in him having to register as a sex offender.”

The deal has received renewed media and legal scrutiny in recent months. In February, Judge Kenneth A. Marra (left) of the Federal District Court in West Palm Beach ruled that the failure by Acosta’s office to notify victims in advance of the deal prevented the victims from being able to exercise their legal right to object before the deal took effect. Marra has set a deadline of May 10 for attorneys for two victims, who filed the lawsuit that led to the ruling, and attorneys for Epstein to propose an alternative deal.

The ruling could ultimately nullify the plea deal.

The Justice Department in February opened an investigation into its handling of the Epstein case after a bipartisan group of senators, led by Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), pressed for answers about the plea agreement.

In March, The Washington Post reported that, although Epstein’s alleged victims were as young as 14, the only minor he was convicted of soliciting was 16 when the offenses began. The decision to charge Epstein with a crime involving an older teen has eased his obligations to register as a sex offender. For example, Epstein does not have to register in New Mexico, where he owns a ranch, because his victim was not under 16.

There are two empty seats on the Fed’s seven-member board. Trump is hoping to fill the other empty seat with conservative economist Stephen Moore, a pick that has led to an outcry from former White House officials in both parties because of Moore’s political background and lack of Fed-related experience.

Trump interviewed Cain, right, for the slot several weeks ago. He has signaled to aides in recent days that he wants to put Cain in the slot, but a final decision has not been made because Cain’s background check hasn’t been completed.

Cain, a restaurant industry executive, was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City from 1992 to 1996. He was part of a group of business and community leaders who advise the head of the Kansas City Fed on how the economy is doing.

Cain has close ties to Trump. In September he launched a super PAC aimed at supporting Trump’s agenda ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

Cain ran for president in 2012 but lost during the Republican primary to Mitt Romney. He became famous for a simplified tax plan, known as Nine-Nine-Nine. His candidacy unraveled over complaints that he sexually harassed multiple women, including an allegation that he groped a woman and tried to force her into a sexual act. (Cain has denied the accusations.)

Roll Call, Dems unlikely to help Cohen get reduced sentence for more information, Griffin Connolly, April 5, 2019. Senior Oversight Democrat says panel is willing to see more material from ex-Trump lawyer, but ‘without any strings attached.’ House Democrats would gladly collect and listen to new information from President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, who told lawmakers in a memo Thursday that he can provide new evidence to support his claims that the president has committed multiple crimes while in office.

But Cohen’s last-ditch plea for lawmakers to help him reduce and delay his three-year prison term to accommodate that new testimony and evidence will likely fall on deaf ears, a senior Democratic member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform told Roll Call Friday.

“I think there’d be real reluctance — at least at first blush — to interfere with the judicial process,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly, one of the longest-serving members on the Oversight panel that held a blockbuster public hearing with Cohen in February.

Palmer Report, Opinion: No way does Donald Trump survive this, Bill Palmer, April 5, 2019. What could be worse for Donald Trump than the news that House Democrats are seeking his financial records, so they can expose his financial crimes and his illicit ties to foreign governments?

On Thursday afternoon it was revealed that for the past four weeks, Capital One has been secretly cooperating with House Democrats when it comes to Trump’s financial records. It’s impossible for Trump to play defense on these kinds of things when the other side has that big of a head start.

By Thursday night, Michael announced that he had indeed just found an old hard drive with fourteen million items on it that may incriminate Trump.

Trump always has his countermoves. He installed William Barr, and it bought him a little time with the Mueller report. He’ll try to make a countermove to block his tax returns from being seized. He’ll try to do something to belatedly undo what Capital One has been doing to him.

But the point is that Donald Trump’s parlor tricks only tend to work when he’s trying to kick one scandal down the road at a time. No one survives this kind of onslaught – not even someone as slippery as Trump. Even John Gotti, the original Teflon Don, ended up going to prison. When a guy is this guilty, and he’s being this aggressively pursued from this many angles, there are only so many countermoves he can make before it catches up to him.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (shown in a file photo) and his ex-wife, MacKenzie Bezos, announced Thursday a divorce settlement that will leave him with 75 percent of their Amazon stock and all of their joint holdings in The Washington Post and a space-exploration company, Blue Origin. He will retain voting power over all of the Amazon voting shares the couple once owned together.

The announcement from the Bezoses -- coming in a tweet from MacKenzie that was retweeted by Jeff -- settled a closely watched matter of corporate governance affecting one of the world’s richest companies, with a market capitalization of $890 billion.

The divorce settlement is likely to remove uncertainty over the extent of Jeff Bezos’s continued control over a company he founded in 1994 and for which he remains chief executive and its largest shareholder. Their marriage lasted 25 years and produced four children.

Mr. Trump’s response seemed like a typical partisan dig, except that it was issued by a man who has been accused by more than a dozen women of misconduct.

For a week, Mr. Trump’s advisers have been watching the spectacle surrounding the accusations that Mr. Biden has touched women inappropriately with something like glee.

Privately, they have admitted that the entire conversation surrounding the former vice president’s approach to politicking seems like a controversy conjured up by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to tar a potential centrist front-runner. But they were happy to enjoy it from the sidelines.

Daily Beast, Porn Stars Find 2020 Democratic Candidates ‘Extremely Depressing,’ Aurora Snow, April 5, 2019. With the presidential election approaching, many constituents in the adult industry are struggling to forgive Democratic candidates’ past voting record. Less than a year ago, most of the 2020 frontrunners voted in favor of two bills: “Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act” and “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act” (commonly known as FOSTA/SESTA), legislation that has negatively impacted sex workers more than the sex trafficking it purports to stop. The new legislation pushes responsibility, and thus legal consequences, to the online platforms that “promote or facilitate prostitution” without distinguishing consenting sex work from coerced sex trafficking.

In an attempt to excuse some of the candidates for their uneducated voting faux pas in passing FOSTA/SESTA, porn star Nina Kayy offers a rather empathetic view. “They probably signed it blindly without talking to anyone in the industry or talking to sex-trafficking victims,” she says. “Sure, a lot of sex workers are mad about it but you have to look at the bigger picture: yes, it’s part of the candidate’s job to reach out and educate themselves, but imagine if they didn’t sign a bill against sex trafficking? How would that look to the people that voted for them?”

According to Kayy, all of the congresspeople vying for the 2020 ticket — Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Corey Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Tulsi Gabbard, etc. — are guilty of doing what the majority of voters do at the polls: voting for the header. Hence a bill even the DOJ expressed uncertainty over was passed, 97-2 in the Senate and 388-25 in the House.

Independent contractors (i.e. sex workers) use online forums to discuss clients, post reviews and warn fellow co-workers of potential dangers. Those options have now largely been removed, with sites—fearing prosecution for “sex trafficking”—hesitating to allow consenting sex workers a platform to validate the safety of clients or independently advertise and book work. It’s thus driven many consenting sex workers off-line and underground, endangering them.

Politicians frequently conflate consensual sex work and sex trafficking despite their drastic differences, whether to push moral agendas or due to ignorance. As seen in the recent massage parlor sting ensnaring New England Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft, the police have repeatedly referred to it as a “sex trafficking” operation, yet no trafficking charges were filed and even the Palm Beach District Attorney admitted "there’s no allegation that any defendant engaged in human trafficking.” Many have speculated that “trafficking” is a term loosely used by law enforcement to sanction prostitution busts.

From the prosecutor’s office to defense attorney, Judge Herb Dodell has argued both sides and calls the trumped-up Kraft sting ridiculous. Sex work and sex trafficking are separate issues, he argues. “There are criteria that have been established on what represents human trafficking versus something else—even in California. Though you don’t have to show there was a force of coercion, human trafficking is basically where you take people and you make them slaves,” explains Dodell. “Prostitution is very, very different—an example clearly represented within the brothels in Nevada.”

One Sunday night in June 2007, 14-year-old Dianna Farrell sat alone in her bedroom in the dark, listening to a Christian radio show where teens discussed their troubles on-air. The host, a man named Dawson McAllister, seemed kind: he spoke to callers empathetically and even gave them advice. Farrell picked up the phone and dialed in. When McAllister asked her what was wrong, she took a deep breath, then told him about the man who had sexually assaulted her at her home eight days earlier. A show staffer called the police.

The next evening, a patrol car appeared outside Farrell’s house in Pinellas County, Florida. She was terrified. She hadn’t meant to cause any problems — she just wanted someone to talk to. A shy eighth grader who was bullied throughout middle school, Farrell didn’t have many friends. She spent most of her free time on the computer by herself, creating digital artwork and learning how to edit photos online. Just a few weeks earlier, she’d celebrated her acceptance to a high school with a special visual arts program.

Farrell paced as a police officer asked questions about the man she’d described on the radio. She frantically explained that she didn’t know his real name, or how old he was. He just went by “Dahvie.” She’d met him a while ago on Myspace, where he had a popular page as an Orlando-based hairstylist. Dahvie had told Farrell that he wanted to give her a new look, so he drove across the state to dye her hair at her house. The girl’s mother, a single parent with two nursing jobs, had to leave for an evening shift shortly after Dahvie arrived, several hours late. Farrell performed oral sex on him that night.

As the officer pressed for details about the encounter — Farrell’s first sexual experience — she started to cry. The 14-year-old was confused about what had happened and afraid of getting Dahvie into trouble. They’d started chatting online in the weeks leading up to her hair appointment, and he would often sign off with messages declaring his love for her. They were friends, she reminded herself, and Dahvie cared about her. What would happen to him if she told police that after finishing with her hair, he had forced himself into her mouth?

“Are you going to call him? You can’t!” Farrell pleaded through tears. “It was no big deal,” she insisted. Everything was consensual, she said.In a police report, 14-year-old Dianna Farrell asked an officer if her sexual abuser would get in trouble.

In a police report, 14-year-old Dianna Farrell asked an officer if her sexual abuser would get in trouble.

After speaking to Farrell and her mother, Captain Kurt Romanosky, a detective from the Crimes Against Children squad of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, called 22-year-old Jesus David Torres, the man known on Myspace as “Dahvie the Elite Hair God.” Romanosky informed Torres that he was aware of the sexual contact with Farrell, and that her mother would not ask cops to arrest Torres if he cut off contact with her daughter. Torres claimed he didn’t know how young Farrell was, said he was sorry and promised not to talk to her again.

Lewd and lascivious battery — sexual penetration of a child between the ages of 12 and 15 by an adult, for which Torres was briefly investigated — is a form of statutory rape and a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Ignorance of the victim’s age is not an admissible defense under Florida law, and 14-year-olds cannot legally consent to sex with 22-year-olds in the state, but police let Torres off anyway.

Torres moved on. Later that year, he started Blood on the Dance Floor (BOTDF), an electro-pop band that quickly took off among kids and teens. Under the stage name Dahvie Vanity, the singer went on to amass close to 2 million online followers while touring all over the country. And in the 12 years since police gave him a warning for assaulting Farrell, Torres has allegedly sexually assaulted nearly two dozen women and underage girls.

U.S. Crime, Courts

San Marcos Record, Former Hays County GOP official arrested for sexual assault of a child, Robin Blackburn, April 5, 2019. A precinct chair and former sergeant-at-arms for the Hays County Republican Party is in jail on a $250,000 bond after being arrested for aggravated sexual assault of a child. Bo Michael Dresner was booked into the Hays County Jail on April 3. There had been reports of sexual abuse involving Dresner (shown in a mugshot) and the same victim going back seven years.

Civil Rights Scandal?

Washington Post, Opinion: Something strange is going on at this civil rights institution. It must be investigated, Jim Tharpe, April 5, 2019. Jim Tharpe is a retired journalist who lives in Atlanta and a former managing editor of the Montgomery Advertiser. There’s something strange afoot at the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the nation’s richest civil and human rights charities. In March, the center abruptly fired legendary co-founder Morris Dees. Dees’s biography was quickly scrubbed from the center’s website, and the SPLC announced this week that Karen Baynes-Dunning would serve as interim president and CEO, giving the civil rights organization its first black female leader.

In confirming Dees’s departure, then-President Richard Cohen emphasized the center’s values of “truth, justice, equity, and inclusion,” and said vaguely, “When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.” Subsequent news reports pointed to allegations of racial discrimination and sexual harassment inside an organization that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars from donors to fight just that type of injustice.

Dees has said little about why he was shown the door after 48 years at the organization he had come to define. But to those of us familiar with the SPLC and its inner workings, the allegations swirling around the latest drama were familiar. The question isn’t what went wrong at the SPLC; it is why it took so long for the rest of the country to learn what local reporters already knew. It will probably take a federal investigation to fully unravel this deep-South mystery and provide a credible, long-term fix.

More than two decades ago, I was managing editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, which was located one block from the SPLC in downtown Montgomery , Ala. I proposed an investigation into the organization after ongoing complaints from former SPLC staffers, who came and went with regularity but always seemed to tell the same story. Only the names and faces changed. The SPLC, they said, was not what it appeared to be. Many urged the newspaper to take a look.

We were, at the time, anything but adversaries with the center. Like other media outlets, we generally parroted SPLC press releases. We also became friends with SPLC staffers, occasionally attending the center’s parties. Some of my reporters dated staffers at the center.

That relationship, however, suddenly soured when reporters Dan Morse and Greg Jaffe (both of whom now work for The Post) began making serious inquiries about the SPLC’s finances and the treatment of black employees.

No matter where the stories came from they all featured a few familiar beats: A loved one seemed to have changed over time. Maybe that person was already somewhat conservative to start. Maybe they were apolitical. But at one point or another, they sat down in front of Fox News, found some kind of deep, addictive comfort in the anger and paranoia, and became a different person — someone difficult, if not impossible, to spend time with.

The fallout led to failed marriages and estranged parental relationships. For at least one person, it marks the final memory he’ll ever have of his father: “When I found my dad dead in his armchair, fucking Fox News was on the TV,” this reader told me. “It’s likely the last thing he saw. I hate what that channel and conservative talk radio did to my funny, compassionate dad. He spent the last years of his life increasingly angry, bigoted, and paranoid.”

Something about the piece struck a chord. It had gone viral, and wave after wave of frustrated and saddened Fox News orphans began to commiserate with me and with each other on Twitter and in my messages. Others wrote of similar phenomenon in Australia with the television channel Sky or in the U.K. with the tabloid Daily Mail. I heard from more than a hundred people who felt like they could relate to what they all seemed to think of as a kind of ideological brain poisoning. They chose Fox News over their family, people told me. They chose Fox News over me.

The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee asked the IRS on Wednesday for six years of President Trump’s personal and business tax returns, a request with which the president immediately said he was not inclined to comply.

The committee chair’s letter to the Internal Revenue Service — and Trump’s immediate and public response — set up what is likely to become an intense and drawn-out court fight as Democrats push to see tax records they think can shed light on numerous aspects of Trump’s business dealings and Trump resists their demands. The Ways and Means chairman’s request was expected but nonetheless represented a significant escalation in House Democrats’ wide-ranging probes of Trump and his administration.

The IRS was given until April 10 to respond. The panel’s chairman was able to make the request because of a 1924 law that gives the chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee broad powers to request and receive the tax returns of any American.

“Congress, as a coequal branch of government, has a duty to conduct oversight of departments and officials,” Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), left, said in a statement. “The Ways and Means Committee in particular has a responsibility to conduct oversight of our voluntary federal tax system and determine how Americans — including those elected to our highest office — are complying with those laws.”

Barr Cover-Up / Spin Alleged

New York Times, Some on Mueller’s Team Say Report Was More Damaging Than Barr Revealed, Nicholas Fandos, Michael S. Schmidt and Mark Mazzetti, April 4, 2019 (print ed.). Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.

At stake in the dispute — the first evidence of tension between Mr. Barr and the special counsel’s office — is who shapes the public’s initial understanding of one of the most consequential government investigations in American history. Some members of Mr. Mueller’s team are concerned that, because Mr. Barr created the first narrative of the special counsel’s findings, Americans’ views will have hardened before the investigation’s conclusions become public.

Mr. Barr (right) has said he will move quickly to release the nearly 400-page report but needs time to scrub out confidential information. The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation. Mr. Barr only briefly cited the special counsel’s work in his letter.

However, the special counsel’s office never asked Mr. Barr to release the summaries soon after he received the report, a person familiar with the investigation said. And the Justice Department quickly determined that the summaries contain sensitive information, like classified material, secret grand-jury testimony and information related to current federal investigations that must remain confidential, according to two government officials.

The officials and others interviewed declined to flesh out why some of the special counsel’s investigators viewed their findings as potentially more damaging for the president than Mr. Barr explained, although the report is believed to examine Mr. Trump’s efforts to thwart the investigation. It was unclear how much discussion Mr. Mueller and his investigators had with senior Justice Department officials about how their findings would be made public. It was also unclear how widespread the vexation is among the special counsel team, which included 19 lawyers, about 40 F.B.I. agents and other personnel.

This morning NBC News reported that according to Mueller’s team, the report paints a “picture of a campaign whose members were manipulated by a sophisticated Russian intelligence operation.” There are two kinds of manipulation in these circumstances: witting and unwitting. Does anyone really think Mueller concluded that when Donald Trump Jr knowingly met with a Russian government representative at Trump Tower with the promise of dirt on Hillary Clinton, he was being unwittingly manipulated? Same goes for when Paul Manafort conspired with Konstantin Kilimnik, whom everyone knows is a former Russian spy, and who is widely suspected of still being one.

So yeah, the Mueller report must have concluded that the Trump campaign knowingly allowed itself to be manipulated by the Russian government. There’s a word for that: collusion. Even if Mueller concluded that this collusion didn’t rise to the level of a criminal conspiracy – which we can no longer assume is the case, now that it’s been proven Barr (right) is lying about the report in general – this still means “yes collusion.” It gets worse.

Now that his attempted coverup of the Mueller report is falling apart, William Barr is clearly in damage control mode. He had the Department of Justice release a statement today which claimed that every page of the Mueller report was marked with a warning that it may contain protected information that can’t be released. This is apparently Barr’s excuse for not releasing Mueller’s summaries.

House OKs Mueller Subpoenas

Washington Post, House panel votes to authorize subpoenas to obtain full Mueller report, Rachael Bade​, April 4, 2019 (print ed.). Attorney General William P. Barr has pledged to deliver a redacted version of the special counsel's report by mid-April, but Democrats said redactions are unacceptable. The fight over the report is expected to land in the courts. A House panel voted Wednesday to authorize subpoenas to obtain special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s full report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, laying down a marker in a constitutional power struggle that could end up in the courts.

The House Judiciary Committee voted 24-17 along party lines to authorize its chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), to subpoena the report and underlying documents of Mueller’s probe from Attorney General William P. Barr.

Acosta / Epstein Scandal

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Investigative Commentary: Another Trump Cabinet link to Jeffrey Epstein, Wayne Madsen, April 4, 2019. Donald Trump’s problems vis a vis his relationship with convicted underage sex offender Jeffrey Epstein just got a bit worse. The former U.S. Attorney for South Florida, Alex Acosta, serves as Trump’s Secretary of Labor. Part of Acosta’s responsibilities include ensuring that federal laws against sex trafficking, including those involving minors, are adequately monitored for enforcement.

WhoWhatWhy, Satire: Mueller’s Problem: Trump Eats Evidence for Lunch, Milicent Cranor, April 4, 2019. I could never understand why anyone would expect President Donald Trump to leave behind evidence of collusion with Russia. After all, Trump eats evidence. Former employee Omarosa Manigault Newman witnessed him indulging in this unusual diet after a meeting with Michael Cohen. In her book, Unhinged: An Insider Account of the Trump White House, she wrote, "I saw him put a note in his mouth. Since Trump was ever the germaphobe, I was shocked he appeared to be chewing and swallowing the paper. It must have been something very, very sensitive."

Media News

St. Louis Public Radio, Missouri Student Journalists, Teachers Hope Bill Will Stop Censorship By School Admins, Andy Field, April 4, 2019. The Missouri Senate is expected to consider a bill to prevent public-university and high school administrators from censoring articles from student journalists. The Cronkite New Voices Act is part of a nationwide movement to give student journalists the same First Amendment rights as professionals. Currently, 14 states have passed New Voices laws, according to the Student Press Law Center. This year, advocates have or will be introducing versions of the bill in 11 states, including Missouri.

Hosted by the Club’s nonprofit Journalism Institute and facilitated by the National Institute of Civil Discourse, the “Dialogue in a Divided Democracy” brought together more than 60 people — news media leaders and the people they cover — for face-to-face conversations about the challenges facing key American institutions. PEN America and the Stennis Center for Public Service Leadership partnered in the event.

April 3

Mueller Probes

Palmer Report, Opinion: Everything hits the fan at once, and Donald Trump is getting hit from all sides, Bill Palmer, April 3, 2019. For a few days there, Donald Trump thought he was winning. Much of the media was reporting William Barr’s laugh out loud “summary” of the Mueller report as if it were the Mueller report, Trump was getting away with falsely claiming he had been exonerated, and he was giddily seeking revenge against, well, everyone. But as the past week has gone on, things have gotten gradually darker for Trump – and today everything hit the fan at once.

Donald Trump is now getting hit from all sides. His attempt at misrepresenting and burying the Mueller report has now failed. We’re about to find out what he’s been so desperately hiding in his tax returns all this time. We’re also about to learn precisely what Trump’s top advisers and family members did to get themselves rejected for security clearances before he overruled them. This is getting uglier for Trump by the hour.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Today is going to be crucial in Donald Trump’s downfall, Bill Palmer, April 3, 2019. Donald Trump spent yesterday exhibiting some of his most frantic, deranged, and cognitively-challenged behavior yet – and for good reason. He knows what today is all about. Before the morning is over, the House Judiciary Committee will have voted to hand unilateral subpoena power to Chairman Jerry Nadler with respect to the Mueller report, and Nadler can be expected to put it to good use almost immediately.

As Palmer Report has spent the past week cautioning, subpoenas aren’t magic wands; they don’t produce immediate or automatic results, which is why the House Democrats didn’t simply start firing them off willy nilly the minute the illegitimate Barr summary was published. Like any sophisticated weapon, the use of the subpoena process has to be handled smartly and strategically in order to get the intended result. For instance, simply subpoenaing the Mueller report, while taking no other action, could set up a lengthy court battle while a judge tries to decide how much of the report should be in the public purview. Nadler has to be smarter in his approach, and he will be.

Nadler, right, has several possible avenues for his subpoenas. He can subpoena the report itself. He can subpoena William Barr to testify about how he took a multi-hundred page report and “summarized” it into four cartoonishly pro-Trump pages. He can subpoena Robert Mueller to testify about his report, and then try to fight off Barr’s inevitable attempt at muzzling Mueller. He can try to subpoena materials from Mueller’s grand jury. The list goes on. The question is how he’ll choose to combine these tactics, and potentially others, into a cohesive strategy which will ensure that the law – and the court of public opinion – remain strongly on his side as Barr tries to fight him every step of the way.

Within hours, we’ll see what Jerry Nadler and his fellow House Democrats have up their sleeve. For now, the most telling sign we have is that Donald Trump is falling to pieces while he waits to find out what’s about to happen to him. Trump isn’t coming off like a guy who’s expecting today to go well for him. We think today will end up being a crucial day in his inevitable downfall.

Major Security Breach By Mar-A-Lago Visitor

New York Times, Woman From China Carrying Malware Arrested After Entering Mar-a-Lago, Frances Robles, April 3, 2019 (print ed.). A 32-year-old woman from China carrying four cellphones and a thumb drive infected with malware gained access to Mar-a-Lago during President Trump’s visit to the Florida resort over the weekend, federal court records show.

The woman, identified as Yujing Zhang, had arrived at the Palm Beach resort and showed two Chinese passports when she sought to be admitted, saying she wanted to use the pool.

She was allowed to enter by Secret Service agents stationed outside the resort after the Mar-a-Lago security manager on duty verified that her last name matched the surname of a member of the club, according to a complaint filed in Federal District Court in South Florida.

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Investigative Commentary: Mar-a-Lago: a center for Chinese espionage and prostitution? Wayne Madsen (right), April 3, 2019 (subscription required; excerpted with permission). WMR was the first to report the possible espionage connection between Cindy Yang, aka Li Yang -- the Mar-a-Lago club habitué and previous owner of the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Florida -- and the Chinese Ministry of State Security (Guójiā Ānquánbù) (国家安全部).

The spa / massage parlor was the scene of a law enforcement prostitution sting that nabbed New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and two other wealthy members of Mar-a-Lago, all three major political donors to the GOP and Trump campaign.

New York Times, Investigation: How Rupert Murdoch’s Empire of Influence Remade the World, Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, April 3, 2019 (print ed.). Part 1: Imperial Reach: Murdoch, 86, right, and his children have toppled governments on two continents and destabilized the most important democracy on Earth. What do they want? Over the last six months, we spoke to more than 150 people about the most powerful media family on earth.

Rupert Murdoch was lying on the floor of his cabin, unable to move. It was January 2018, and Murdoch and his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, were spending the holidays cruising the Caribbean on his elder son Lachlan’s yacht. Murdoch tripped on his way to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Few private citizens have ever been more central to the state of world affairs than the man lying in that hospital bed, awaiting his children’s arrival.

As the head of a sprawling global media empire, he commanded multiple television networks, a global news service, a major publishing house and a Hollywood movie studio. His newspapers and television networks had been instrumental in amplifying the nativist revolt that was reshaping governments not just in the United States but also across the planet.

New York Times, Here are six takeaways from The Times’s investigation.

More Investigative Reports

Greg Palast Investigative Journalism, Trump May Name Kris Kobach New Immigration Czar, Greg Palast (right), April 3, 2019. Their real agenda: 2020 vote suppression. When the young Kris Kobach created a computer system for the Department of Homeland Security that secretly tracked visiting Muslims, President George W. Bush was so offended that he personally ordered the racially offensive program shut down.

And now Kobach may have power over that Department and all others dealing with immigrants – including Justice and Defense, and the Census — if the AP report that President Donald Trump is considering making Kobach his “Immigration Czar” becomes reality.

It’s an especially cute move by Trump, as this newly crafted position, unlike an apointment to other cabinet level posts, will not require Senate approval, not even a hearing.

I’ve been investigating Kobach (left) for six years for Al Jazeera and Rolling Stone. Trying to get straight answers from Kobach about his racially poisoned vote-purging shenanigans has not been easy. After several refusals to speak with me about our findings, in 2016, I finally tracked him down in Wichita, with my crew pretending to be from a local TV station. (We were indeed with Channel 4 … Channel 4 of London.)

Peace Activism

Let's Try Democracy, Grassroots Activism / Opinion, NATO Interrupted, David Swanson (right), April 3, 2019. Wednesday morning an event was held in a building overlooking Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., at an organization called the Center for European Policy Analysis, which is funded by: FireEye, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Bell Helicopters, BAE systems, the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon, National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. Mission to NATO, and NATO’s own Public Diplomacy Division.

Participating in the event were several foreign ministers from NATO nations, ambassadors to NATO, and U.S. Senator Chris Murphy. NATO is designed to vigilantly protect you from numerous imaginary and NATO-provoked dangers, but its events are apparently protected by magic spells, as I just walked in and took a seat.

When I couldn’t take any more of the pro-militarism talk, I stood up and interrupted, holding up a sign reading: “Yes to Peace / NoToNATO.org.” Lots of media cameras were in the room, so there is bound to be video somewhere. (Please share it with me.) I said words to this general effect:

"NATO needs to be shut down, not enlarged. Russia spends a tiny percentage of what NATO nations do on war, and you pretend to be afraid of Russia. We’re not buying it. You’re provoking dangers. NATO makes up 3/4 of military spending in the world. Its members are also responsible for about 3/4 of foreign weapons dealing — to dictatorships and so-called democracies around the world. NATO wages aggressive wars far from the North Atlantic. The people you can hear chanting outside have had enough. We’re not believing these myths anymore."

I continued along those lines for a little while before leaving. We sang songs and spoke to people in the building’s lobby and on the sidewalk out front, and did interviews with media from every continent other than North America, before heading off to Capitol Hill where the head of NATO was being welcomed in bipartisan harmony.

NATO is encountering protest everywhere it goes in Washington on Wednesday and will on Thursday as well. Detailed plans.

Washington Post, NATO chief rebuts Trump’s criticisms — but also offers praise — in speech to Congress, Anne Gearan and Karoun Demirjian, April 3, 2019. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg drew bipartisan applause and some 18 standing ovations Wednesday as he made a case to Congress for the survival of the transatlantic alliance that was built out of the ashes of World War II, but his most important audience was not in the room.

Addressing a joint meeting of the House and Senate to commemorate NATO’s founding in Washington 70 years ago this week, Stoltenberg aimed much of his approximately 40-minute speech at answering President Trump’s skepticism and occasional hostility toward the alliance, while throwing in some praise of the president as well.

The NATO chief thanked the United States for building and sustaining the alliance as it grew from 12 members to 29 and credited Trump with forcing a reckoning among NATO nations over how they fund their joint commitment to military defense.

In an exercise that had far less suspense than when then-Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, made the move back in 2013, the Senate voted, 48-51, overturning the ruling of the presiding officer and setting a new precedent declaring that the remaining debate time for Jeffrey Kessler to be an assistant secretary of Commerce was two hours. A “no” vote was to overturn the presiding officer and establish the two-hour limit.

Senate rules had allowed for a maximum of 30 hours after cutting off debate, so the cut in deliberation time is drastic.

All Democrats voted against the effort put forward by GOP leadership. They were joined by Republicans Mike Lee of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine.

The vote to set a new precedent was just the most recent use of the “nuclear option.” It is called that because it changes the way the Senate does business by a simple majority, avoiding the need for proponents to secure the support of supermajorities of senators that filibuster rules typically require.

Washington Post, Trump mocks Biden over allegations of inappropriate touching, Felicia Sonmez, April 3, 2019 (print ed.). In a speech at a Republican fundraising dinner, the president took aim at his potential 2020 White House rival, who has faced growing allegations of inappropriate behavior toward women.

Washington Post, Border surge puts pressure on Democrats to craft their own immigration solutions — not just oppose Trump, Michael Scherer, April 2, 2019. Julián Castro, former San Antonio mayor, is the first of the party’s presidential candidates to offer a detailed immigration plan. Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro on Tuesday offered a far-reaching plan to remake the nation’s immigration policy, with a new call to end criminal penalties for migrants entering the country without permission and a plan to remove detention as a tool for most immigration enforcement.

Castro’s proposal, the first detailed immigration policy blueprint from any of the Democratic candidates for president, is a clear sign that the party’s leaders will be pressured to move beyond simply condemning President Trump’s policies over the coming months to offer their own detailed solutions to a surging influx of migrant families seeking asylum at the southern border.

Like other candidates, Castro, right, who is the only Latino in the race, calls for a wholesale rejection of Trump’s approach. But his plan is the first to offer specifics that would amount to a more permissive environment for undocumented immigrants than existed under the Obama administration.

Castro says his plan is premised on the idea that the southern border is more secure than it has been in decades. The former head of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and mayor of San Antonio would end border wall construction, allow deported veterans who honorably served to return to the United States, increase refu­gee quotas and make it easier for family members to be reunited with relatives who are U.S. residents. He would ask Congress to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States, including young people who received protections under the Obama administration and those covered by the Temporary Protected Status program.

He said he would also create a “21st-century Marshall Plan” for Central America to attack the woeful conditions there, seen as the root cause of the recent increase in asylum seekers. For those who reach the country’s interior, he would reconstitute the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, by reassigning its interior enforcement functions to other agencies, including the Justice Department. He would also re-prioritize Customs and Border Protection efforts to focus on drug and human trafficking instead of interior law enforcement.

By repealing the criminal code that allows the Trump administration to prosecute people who enter the country, Castro would remove the mechanism that previously allowed the administration to separate asylum-seeking parents and children after detention. Trump has since stopped those prosecutions, though single adults continue to face criminal penalties. Castro said he would impose a civil legal process for sorting out refu­gee applications and deportations, with an emphasis on jailing and removing only those with criminal records.

Terrorists' Refugee Camp

Washington Post, The Islamic State’s refugees are facing a humanitarian calamity, Erin Cunningham and Kamiran Sadoun, April 3, 2019 (print ed.). Last week, 31 people died on the way to a Syrian camp or shortly after arriving because of injuries and malnutrition, the International Rescue Committee says, bringing the total number of such deaths to 217.

More On Changing Media

New York Times, Media Companies Take a Big Gamble on Apple, Edmund Lee, April 3, 2019 (print ed.). Executives have been burned by their previous dealings with big tech companies. But Apple’s promise of a billion devices worldwide was too good to pass up. Even for Rupert Murdoch.

The tech giant based the service on an app it acquired last year called Texture, which gave readers access to some 200 publications with a single subscription. The revamped and renamed version, introduced with much fanfare last week at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., charges subscribers $9.99 a month ($12.99 in Canada) for content from more than 300 titles, including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Time, The Atlantic and People, as well as The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal. (Also included: Airbnb Magazine, Birds & Blooms, Retro Gamer and Salt Water Sportsman, befitting the app’s conceit as an omnibus newsstand.)

The site’s founder, Joseph Farah — a former newspaperman with a dense, jet-black mustache and a cloak-and-dagger mystique — boasted in 2010 that he was well on the way to generating $10 million a year in revenue. His Northern Virginia-headquartered news site, known by the acronym WND, was having its moment by stoking rumors about Obama.

But Farah — a conservative Internet pioneer who’d once been labeled by the Clinton White House as part of a right-wing media conspiracy and was known to sport a pistol on his hip in the office—saw bigger things. Years earlier he’d launched one of the first large-scale digital newsgathering operations; now he wanted to be a player in Christian-themed movies and book publishing, churning out titles by big-name conservatives, such as anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly and future House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).

He was building an empire.

A decade later, that realm is being sucked into a tornado of unpaid bills, pink-slipped employees, chaotic accounting, declining revenue and diminishing readership, according to interviews with more than 25 former employees, shareholders, company insiders and authors associated with the firm's flailing publishing units, as well as a review of hundreds of internal documents, including emails and financial statements obtained by The Washington Post.

Even though Farah claimed in WND columns and emails to supporters last year to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations —including tax-deductible contributions — some former employees and contractors have been laid off or had their deals canceled without being paid money they say they were owed. Many authors who signed on with the site’s publishing arm, including former Republican senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, are fuming about allegedly not receiving royalties owed to them.

The cloud effort, known as the C2E Commercial Cloud Enterprise, builds on an earlier $600 million cloud computing contract that was awarded to Amazon’s cloud computing division in 2013. And it runs parallel to a separate, $10 billion cloud effort being pursued by the Defense Department.

Both efforts are meant to outfit U.S. national security agencies with next-generation cloud computing innovations from Silicon Valley.

Crime, Courts

Politico, Feds: Manafort ex-son-in-law used meth, cocaine in jail, Josh Gerstein, April 3, 2019. Paul Manafort's ex-son-in-law Jeffrey Yohai admitted to using methamphetamine and cocaine while being held in a federally-run jail in Los Angeles on a series of a fraud charges earlier this year, according to federal prosecutors.

Yohai pleaded guilty to one set of scams in federal court early last year, but allegedly committed more while out on bail and was arrested on state charges, then hit with another round on federal ones. A source familiar with the case told Politico Yohai made entreaties to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office, but little or nothing came of the effort.

If you can dream up a financial scam, there’s a good chance that Wells Fargo ran it on its customers in recent years. Last week, after years of pressure, the company finally parted ways with its second chief executive in three years. But that’s not nearly enough accountability. It’s time to reform our laws to make sure that corporate executives face jail time for overseeing massive scams.

Vitaly Kamluk, a cybersecurity and malware expert, was returning from vacation on Singapore Airlines in February when his wife noticed a small circle that looked like a camera lens along the lower edge of the video screen in the seat back.

“It really looked like a camera to me, but you can never be sure,” Mr. Kamluk said. So he took a photo of the circle and tweeted it to the airline.

He got a quick response from Singapore, which acknowledged that it was a camera but said it had been “disabled.” He also got plenty of attention on Twitter.

Militants in southern Afghanistan had already salted the earth with bombs when Sgt. Dominic Esquibel led his Marines through Sangin. On his final patrol, the ground ruptured under his feet in an explosion of light and blood.

The blast tore at his right arm and shattered parts of his right leg and foot. “I thank God it was me,” he told author Bing West from a hospital bed in 2011, “rather than one of my men.”

Doctors were barely able to salvage Esquibel’s foot. He wears an carbon-fiber exoskeleton brace to help him walk and run.

With the number of demonstrations on the rise, stretching the department’s resources, Park Service acting director Dan Smith said the agency wanted to test the waters of public opinion, but he said no decision has been made as to how the Park Service might recover costs.

More than 180,000 people responded during a public comment period last year. Of those, Smith told members of the House Natural Resources Committee, more than 71,000 were “substantive,” including multi-page letters of opposition from civil rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Park Service should have a verdict on how to proceed in the next three months, Smith said.

Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) asked Smith about the likelihood activists would need to pay back the government for the cost of supporting protests. She noted that organizations with various political ideologies opposed the proposal.

“Yesterday, this committee received a letter from a broad coalition of stakeholders, from the Charles Koch Institute to the ACLU, condemning the administration’s attempt to limit First Amendment protests in D.C.,” Haaland said. “It isn’t often that we see such divergent groups agree.”

Global Analysis: Ukraine Election

Ukraine 2019 Presidential Elections Result as of April 1st (BBC graph), showing comedian Volodmyer Zelenskiy (shown below right in a file screenshot) as leader with 30 percent, nearly twice the total as incumbent President Petro Petroshenko, the only other candidate to make the run-off later this month.

Unz Review, Opinion: A few initial thoughts about the first round of the Ukrainian Presidential election, The Saker, April 3, 2019. The first round of the Presidential election in the Ukraine took place on April Fool’s Day and it could be tempting to dismiss it all like a big farce which, of course, it was, but, we should not overlook the fact that some very interesting and important events have just taken place. I won’t discuss them all right now, there will be plenty of time for that in the future.

For now I will only focus on those elements of a much bigger picture which seem most critical to me. These elements are:

1) The Nazis suffered a crushing defeat in this election. By “Nazis” I primarily mean their main figurehead – Petro Poroshenko (the rest of the “minor Nazis” did so poorly that they don’t matter anymore). Think of it: in spite of his immense wealth (he outspent everybody else and even spent more that twice what the next big spender – [Iulia] Tymoshenko – doled out for each vote), in spite of his immense “administrative resource” (that is the Russian expression for the ability to use the power of the state for your personal benefit), in spite of his “victory” with the Tomos, in spite of triggering the Kerch bridge incident, in spite of breaking all the remaining treaties with Russia, in spite of his control of the media and in spite of the (now admittedly lukewarm) support of the West, Poroshenko suffered a crushing defeat.

See for yourself:

Look at the only two regions Petro Poroshenko (i.e. the Nazis) actually won (in blue) and see how nicely they overlap with the rough historical contours of the Galicia region. But Poroshenko managed to even lose part of that to Iulia Tymoshenko!

Bottom line: except for a minority of rabid hardcore Nazis in Galicia, the rest of the Ukraine hates the Poroshenko Ukronazi regime. We always knew that, but now we have the proof.

What we do see is key agencies, actors, individuals all having their own “mini foreign policies” which sometimes brings about goofy results (like when the CIA and the Pentagon support different sides in a conflict). In fact, the two main branches of Ukrainian politics – Nazis and Zionists – are both richly represented in the US government and various entities support different candidates and different agendas. The same is also true for the EU, but since the EU is almost irrelevant (Victoria Nuland was quite right about that), this does not matter.

The exchange at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing marked the first time Acosta has been questioned publicly about the case since a judge ruled in February that the 2008 arrangement he oversaw as a U.S. attorney in South Florida had broken the law because his office failed to properly notify victims.

“You chose wealthy and well-connected people, child rapists, over the victims in this case,” said Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-Mass., shown on her Twitter photo), who noted that “the hideous truth has come out” about Acosta’s role in the case.

Clark cited the Epstein case as she questioned Acosta on his department’s decision to propose cutting the budget for one of its divisions tasked with combating human trafficking from $68 million to $18.5 million.

“This isn’t the first time you have ignored human trafficking,” Clark said. “If you as U.S. attorney could not fight for these girls, how, as secretary of labor, can you tell this panel and the American people that you can responsibly oversee this budget [and] the Department of Labor, including human trafficking?”

Acosta responded that human trafficking is “an in­cred­ibly important issue” and said the Justice Department had long defended the plea deal.

“Epstein was incarcerated,” Acosta said. “He registered as a sex offender. The world was put on notice that he was a sex offender, and the victims received restitution.”

The 2008 plea deal stemmed from a federal investigation of Epstein (right) focused on alleged sex trafficking and molestation of dozens of underage girls. Before the deal, prosecutors drafted a 53-page federal indictment that included sex trafficking charges, which could have placed Epstein in prison for life.

Epstein’s plea agreement allowed him to instead plead guilty to two state felony solicitation charges, casting the victims as prostitutes. The deal led to a 13-month stay in county jail during which Epstein was allowed to leave custody six days a week, 12 hours a day, for work.

Acosta, 50, has received support from his boss, President Trump, who in February called him a “fantastic labor secretary.” On Wednesday, Acosta argued that Epstein would have faced even lighter punishment had the plea deal not been struck.

“I understand the frustration,” he said. “I think it’s important for people to know he was going to get off with no jail time or restitution. It was the work of our office that resulted in him going to jail. It was the work of our office that resulted in him having to register as a sex offender.”

The deal has received renewed media and legal scrutiny in recent months. In February, Judge Kenneth A. Marra (left) of the Federal District Court in West Palm Beach ruled that the failure by Acosta’s office to notify victims in advance of the deal prevented the victims from being able to exercise their legal right to object before the deal took effect. Marra has set a deadline of May 10 for attorneys for two victims, who filed the lawsuit that led to the ruling, and attorneys for Epstein to propose an alternative deal.

The ruling could ultimately nullify the plea deal.

The Justice Department in February opened an investigation into its handling of the Epstein case after a bipartisan group of senators, led by Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), pressed for answers about the plea agreement.

In March, The Washington Post reported that, although Epstein’s alleged victims were as young as 14, the only minor he was convicted of soliciting was 16 when the offenses began. The decision to charge Epstein with a crime involving an older teen has eased his obligations to register as a sex offender. For example, Epstein does not have to register in New Mexico, where he owns a ranch, because his victim was not under 16.

April 2

U.S. Politics

New York Times, Trump Lashes Out Again at Puerto Rico, Bewildering the island, Annie Karni and Patricia Mazzei, April 2, 2019. Mr. Trump lashed out at Puerto Rico again over federal aid after Hurricane Maria, leaving officials bewildered. President Trump on Tuesday lashed out at Puerto Rico’s local lawmakers as “grossly incompetent” and singled out one of his favorite targets, Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, as “crazed and incompetent.”

Mr. Trump’s latest invective toward the local leaders of an island devastated by a hurricane in September 2017 came in a torrent of tweets, which began on Monday night and spilled into Tuesday morning. Mr. Trump was reacting after the Senate on Monday blocked billions of dollars in disaster aid for Midwestern states, in part because Democrats said a proposed $600 million in nutritional assistance to Puerto Rico fell short of its needs.

“Puerto Rico got far more money than Texas & Florida combined, yet their government can’t do anything right, the place is a mess — nothing works,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. He also stated, incorrectly, that Puerto Rico had received $91 billion in aid from the federal government.

In fact, FEMA and other agencies have so far distributed $11.2 billion in aid to Puerto Rico, according to the Office of Management and Budget. Some $41 billion in aid has been allocated, while $91 billion is the budget office’s estimate of how much the island could receive over the next two decades.

Unz Review, Opinion: Jewish Power Rolls Over Washington, Philip M. Giraldi (author and former CIA officer, shown at right), April 2, 2019. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has just completed its annual summit in Washington. It claims that 18,000 supporters attended the event, which concluded with a day of lobbying Congress by the attendees. Numerous American politicians addressed the gathering and it is completely reasonable to observe that the meeting constituted the most powerful gathering of people dedicated to promoting the interests of a foreign nation ever witnessed in any country in the history of the world.

There are a number of things that one should understand about the Jewish state of Israel and its powerful American domestic lobby. First of all, the charge that the actions of The Lobby (referred to with capital letters because of its uniqueness and power) inevitably involves dual or even singular allegiance based on religion or tribe to a country where the lobbyist does not actually reside is completely correct by definition of what AIPAC is and why it exists. It claims to work to “ensure that the Jewish state is safe, strong and secure” through “foreign aid, government partnerships, [and] joint anti-terrorism efforts…,” all of which involve the U.S. as the donor and Israel as the recipient.

Second, there is the claim that Israel benefits American security. That is also a lie. Washington’s relationship with Israel, which is now more subservient than it ever has been, is a major liability that is and always has been damaging to both American regional and global interests. The recent decisions to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights were ill-conceived and have been condemned by the world community, including by nearly all of America’s genuine close allies.

Trump Security Scandals

Washington Post, Analysis: The White House whistleblower bombshell, and what it could mean, Aaron Blake, April 2, 2019 (print ed.). Trump overrode officials' concerns to demand Kushner's security clearance. The White House has repeatedly shunned national security protocols when it comes to protecting information and clearances. And a named person stepping forward is a significant development.

It wasn’t that long ago that Donald Trump ran for president making the case that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state represented a grave national security threat and made her unfit for office.

After denying security clearances to 25 Trump political appointees on the White House staff, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Newbold was overruled by higher-level officials in the Trump administration.

President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump, shown above on one of their many foreign affairs events, were reportedly awarded security clearances at the president's demand over the objections of professional security staff (White House photo).

Tricia Newbold, a longtime White House security adviser, told the House Oversight and Reform Committee that she and her colleagues issued “dozens” of denials for security clearance applications that were later approved despite their concerns about blackmail, foreign influence, or other red flags, according to panel documents released Monday.

Newbold, an 18-year veteran of the security clearance process who has served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, said she warned her superiors that clearances “were not always adjudicated in the best interest of national security” — and was retaliated against for doing so.

“I would not be doing a service to myself, my country, or my children if I sat back knowing that the issues that we have could impact national security,” Newbold told the committee, according to a panel document summarizing her allegations.

Newbold added: “I feel that right now this is my last hope to really bring the integrity back into our office.”

The allegation comes during an escalating fight over the issue between House Democrats and the White House. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), the committee chairman, said in a letter to the White House Counsel’s Office that his panel would vote on Tuesday to subpoena at least one individual who overruled Newbold — the committee’s first compulsory move aimed at the White House.

New York Times, Whistle-Blower Did the Unexpected: She Returned to Work, Katie Rogers, April 2, 2019 (print ed.).Tricia Newbold, the Trump administration’s latest whistle-blower, did something unexpected only hours after a House committee released her deposition that the White House had overruled career staff members who denied officials their security clearances: She went back to work.

“As you can imagine,” Ms. Newbold, left, a 39-year-old employee of the White House Personnel Security Office, wrote in an email during her commute on Monday, “I am extremely nervous for how people at work will treat me.”

But according to people close to her, she was not afraid to tell them about the things she had seen. Ms. Newbold’s decision to accuse her own office of rampant mismanagement of the security clearances of at least 25 employees came after months of what she characterized as personal discrimination and professional retaliation from Carl Kline, the office’s former director, after she spent roughly a year trying to raise issues internally.

In a White House where aggressive leak investigations are conducted in service of President Trump, who has aides sign nondisclosure agreements, Ms. Newbold’s account represents the rarest of developments: a damning on-the-record account from a current employee inside his ranks.

“She wasn’t looking for trouble,” Ms. Newbold’s lawyer, Edward Passman, said in an interview on Monday. “And she wasn’t looking to go public. But her back was to the wall and she did what she had to do.”

Described as both “no nonsense” and “intense” by people who have interacted with her during the clearance process, Ms. Newbold has served under four presidential administrations, beginning with the Clinton White House in 2000. Eventually she worked her way up to adjudications manager, a job that required her to help make determinations about the security clearances of administration employees. Her office is filled with holdovers from other administrations, and it is meant to be nonpartisan.

Mueller Probe

New York Times, Opinion: The House Must See the Whole Mueller Report, Jerrold L. Nadler (right, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee), April 2, 2019 (print ed.). Someday, Trump will not be in office. Congress needs a full accounting of his misdeeds to ensure they don’t happen again.

Washington Post, House committee plans vote this week to subpoena full Mueller report, John Wagner​, April 2, 2019 (print ed.). The House Judiciary Committee plans to vote Wednesday to authorize subpoenas to obtain special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, escalating a feud with the Justice Department.

Washington Post, Khashoggi children receive payments, houses from Saudi Arabia after killing, Greg Miller, April 2, 2019 (print ed.). Slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s children have received million-dollar houses and monthly five-figure payments, and they may also receive much larger payouts as part of “blood money” negotiations expected to ensue when the trials of the accused killers end, current and former Saudi officials say.

Washington Post, Documentary: The assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, Joyce Lee and Dalton Bennett, April 2, 2019 (print ed.). It’s been six months since agents from Saudi Arabia killed The Washington Post contributing columnist. What has been done to hold those responsible accountable?

Washington Post, Opinion: It’s been six months since Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, and Trump has done nothing, April 2, 2019.

Washington Post, Opinion: How the mysteries of Khashoggi’s murder have rocked the U.S.-Saudi partnership, April 2, 2019.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump has complete meltdown after Democrats defeat him on Puerto Rico, Bill Palmer, April 2, 2019. Even as Donald Trump threatens to cut off all aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras – or as Fox News calls them, the Mexican countries – it’s less clear than ever if Trump understands that Puerto Rico is part of the United States. After the Senate Democrats derailed Trump’s latest effort at screwing over Puerto Rico, Trump did what he does best: he threw an ignorant and dishonest tantrum.

What actually happened on Monday was that Donald Trump and the Republicans tried to pass legislation which broadly provided funds for disaster relief across the United States, while coming up extraordinarily short on providing disaster relief for Puerto Rico. This isn’t surprising, considering that Trump’s racist agenda has no time for the primarily nonwhite U.S. territory, as he made clear when he refused to provide anything close to adequate relief after Hurricane Maria.

This means Trump and the GOP are going to have to revise this legislation to include more aid for Puerto Rico. But don’t tell that bit of truth to Trump, who posted this word vomit about Puerto Rico on Twitter late on Monday night: “the place is a mess – nothing works.” That’s right, not only is Donald Trump trying to cover for his political and mental incompetence by ranting on Twitter, he’s also trying to cover for it by attacking nonwhite people.

In two bursts of tweets — one late Monday night and another Tuesday morning — Trump complained about the amount of federal relief money going to the island and called its politicians “incompetent or corrupt.”

He also claimed that Puerto Rico “got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane,” a figure that actually reflects a high-end, long-term estimate for recovery costs. Only a fraction of that has so far been budgeted, and even less has been spent.

As he pressed to defend Trump’s contentions, Gidley sought to make the case that the leaders of the territory, whose residents are U.S. citizens, have mishandled the aid they’ve received thus far. During the interview, Gidley was also asked about a tweet in which Trump said Puerto Rico’s leaders “only take from the USA.”

Washington Post, North Carolina GOP chairman indicted in campaign finance bribery scheme, Colby Itkowitz, April 2, 2019. A federal grand jury has indicted the chairman of the Republican Party of North Carolina in an alleged bribery scheme, accusing him of helping a wealthy political donor try to bribe a state regulator whose department has oversight of the donor’s company.

Federal prosecutors said Tuesday that the chairman, Robin Hayes, right, who is also a former U.S. congressman, and three other people plotted to funnel campaign contributions to Mike Causey, the commissioner of the North Carolina Department of Insurance, in exchange for him taking actions that would benefit donor Greg Lindberg’s company.

Causey is not charged in the case. By January 2018, prosecutors say, Causey became suspicious and alerted federal law enforcement, then participated in their investigation.

Lawyers for Hayes and Lindberg could not immediately be reached. Hayes’s attorney Kearns Davis told Bloomberg News that Hayes “steadfastly denies” the allegations.

Senators blocked, 51-48, an effort by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to bring up a resolution that would have set a new standing order. The support of 60 senators would have been needed to advance the debate.

It came as part of the never-ending debate over delays in confirmation of nominations, particularly on lower-level executive branch nominations and district judges

Washington Post, Police name suspect in Nipsey Hussle killing; chaos erupts at memorial, Allyson Chiu and Tim Elfrink, April 2, 2019. Late on Monday, police identified Eric Holder as a suspect in the killing of Grammy-nominated rapper Nipsey Hussle, whose death over the weekend sent shock waves across Los Angeles and the country as city officials, celebrities and fans mourned the loss of a talented musician and dedicated community organizer.

The news came shortly after a memorial for the rapper (shown at right in his Twitter photo) erupted into chaos when hundreds of mourners, fearing that a gun had been fired, stampeded out of a parking lot, leaving at least a dozen injured.

Authorities said they are still searching for Holder, a 29-year-old Los Angeles resident who was last seen fleeing the scene of the shooting on Sunday in a 2016 white Chevy Cruze driven by an unidentified woman.

Hussle’s murder happened around 3:20 p.m. Sunday, when the rapper and two other men were standing in front of his store. Police allege Holder walked up to the men and “fired numerous shots at them.” Holder then allegedly ran through a nearby alley and hopped into a waiting car, a news release said.\

Hussle’s death came just one day before he had plans to meet with the president of the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners and the city’s chief of police to “to talk about ways he could help stop gang violence and help us help kids.”

Washington Post, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh takes leave of absence amid scandal, Rachel Chason, Erin Cox and Ovetta Wiggins, April 2, 2019 (print ed.). Baltimore Mayor Catherine E. Pugh (shown above in a screenshot) is taking an indefinite leave of absence amid growing condemnation of profits she made from selling a children’s book to businesses intertwined with the government she oversees.

Washington Post, He scammed his closest friends to go tailgating in a Mercedes, Rachel Weiner,April 2, 2019 (print ed.). As the best man at a Penn State classmate’s wedding, chosen over two blood brothers, Brian Sapp (shown above in one of his marketing promos) gave a toast to the importance of friendship.

He went on to steal the life savings of several people present, including half a million dollars from the groom. Among his victims were the father of a severely disabled child, the parents of his godchildren and a man dying of pancreatic cancer — whose widow Sapp asked for $75,000 just days after the funeral.

For his four-year, $1.8 million real estate scam, Sapp, 38, was sentenced Friday to nine years in prison.

Jonathan Oldale, 55, (right) had been a fixture in the town of Somerset, an affluent enclave of 1,200 just outside Washington. With two children of his own, he also was involved in the lives of other kids in the neighborhood. He led a Cub Scout pack, took photos for the elementary school yearbook and volunteered as a room parent at school.

“I want action from the Virginia legislature,” Watson told interviewer Gayle King on “CBS This Morning”. “There is no amount of money that could ever compensate what he did to me or what I live with every day. I want the people of Virginia to know the truth and I would like the Virginia legislature to do the right thing.”

Watson says Fairfax sexually assaulted her in 2000 when both were undergraduate students at Duke University. Her television appearance comes a day after the CBS program aired an interview with Vanessa Tyson, who accused the lieutenant governor of forcing her to perform oral sex during the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

Related story: Richmond Times-Dispatch, Fairfax accuser Vanessa Tyson details allegations against lieutenant governor in TV interview, Mel Leonor, April 2, 2019 (print ed.). Vanessa Tyson, one of two women who have publicly accused Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexual assault, tearfully described her allegations in an interview with CBS’ Gayle King, which aired Monday. Tyson, a political science professor at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., told King that her encounter with Fairfax in a Boston hotel room in 2004 began as consensual kissing, but quickly turned violent when Fairfax restrained her by the neck.

Using her hand, Tyson mimicked being pushed down by the neck to perform oral sex.

In a statement, Fairfax again denied the allegations by Tyson and second accuser Meredith Watson. A news release from his office Sunday said Fairfax had submitted to a polygraph with a former FBI expert that showed he was being truthful when he said the encounters were consensual.

Tyson’s first televised interview on the alleged assault comes days before Virginia lawmakers gather in Richmond on Wednesday to consider Gov. Ralph Northam’s vetoes and proposed budget amendments.

The interview could increase pressure on lawmakers to heed Tyson’s calls for a public hearing on the matter.

Venezuelan Leadership

Associated Press via Fox News, Venezuela lawmakers strip opposition leader of his immunity, Scott Smith, April 2, 2019. Venezuelan lawmakers loyal to President Nicolas Maduro have stripped opposition leader Juan Guaido of his immunity from prosecution. The move by the government-backed National Constituent Assembly on Tuesday paves the way for Guaido's prosecution, and possibly his arrest.

But it is still unclear whether Maduro will actively threaten Guaido, who has embarked on an international campaign to topple the president's socialist administration. Up until now, Maduro has avoided throwing the 35-year-old lawmaker in jail — a man that the U.S. and roughly 50 other nations have recognized as Venezuela's legitimate leader.

In January, Guaido declared himself Venezuela's interim president and vowed to overthrow Maduro. Maduro blames Washington for trying to install a puppet government to seize Venezuela's vast oil reserves.

Russia-Venezuela Analyzed

Unz Review, Opinion: Venezuela, a New Syria, Israel Shamir, April 2, 2019. A few days ago, an Ilyushin IL-62M liner carried over a hundred Russian soldiers and officers to Caracas. Symbolically, they made a stopover in Syria, as if saying that Venezuela is the next country after Syria to be saved from ruin and dismemberment. The military mission was led by the Head of General Staff, General Tonkoshkurov (“Thin-Skinned”, a name that would thrill Vladimir Nabokov).

‘Don’t you dare,' exclaimed John Bolton, 'meddle in the Western Hemisphere! Hands off Venezuela! It is our back yard!’ The Russians didn’t buy it. Some time ago they tried to object to the US tanks being positioned in Estonia, a brief drive from St Petersburg, and all they’ve got was preaching that sovereignty means sovereignty, and Estonia does not have to ask for Russian permission to receive American military assistance. Now they repeated this American sermon verbatim to John Bolton and his boss. Get out of Syria first, they added.

This is a new level in the Russian-American relations, or should we say confrontation. For a very long time, the Russians convinced themselves that their liking for the United States was mutual, or at least would be returned one day. However, this stage is over, the scales fell off their eyes and they finally realised America’s implacable enmity.

I do not regret that Russian-American relations have gone from bad to worse. The world needs balance, and Russians do provide a counterweight to the heavy-handed Uncle Sam. The worst time in recent history was around 1990, when Russia practically ceased to exist as an important factor of international politics. Then, the US stormed over Panama and Iraq, bombed Belgrade, created al Qaeda, and destroyed its own working class. If uppity darkie bus driver Maduro would try to say ‘no’ to Washington in 1990s, he would be kidnapped, arrested, tried for, say, child abuse or drugs trafficking and jailed for thirty years. The then Russian president Yeltsin wouldn’t even notice between his drunken bouts that Venezuela had reverted to direct colonial rule.

Putin decided to support Venezuela’s Maduro. Thus a new level in the hybrid war had been broken. Venezuelans had moved the headquarters of their oil company to Moscow, and defiant Russia has accepted them.

The US immediately responded by cyber-attacking Venezuelan power stations and causing an extensive blackout.

It is probably the first large-scale cyber-attack upon the infrastructure of an enemy. The destruction of Iranian centrifuges by means of Stuxnet was still limited in scope and did not interfere with the general economy. The Venezuela electric grid had been recently updated and extensively modernised by the big international company ABB. When the upgrading was done, the company said in its press release that now Venezuela has the best and most advanced electric equipment. Apparently, the most advanced equipment is more vulnerable to cyber threats.

Every Washington-organised regime change in Latin America usually included an attack on the power grid (for instance, removal of Chile’s Allende), but until now the adversary had to dirty his hands physically, by sabotaging power stations and transmission lines. Now they have learned how to do it from outside, from Miami.

Venezuelans noticed that the first warning of their blackout had been made by Marco Rubio (right): “Marco Rubio announced hours before the blackout that “Venezuelans will live the most severe shortage of food and gasoline,” revealing he had knowledge that some kind of shock would happen in the next few hours.” The Moon of Alabama also accepts the cyber-attack explanation, though hedges it by reminding that ‘shit happens’, and the US has also experienced blackouts.

“My father is German, right? Was German. And born in a very wonderful place in Germany, so I have a great feeling for Germany,” Trump said during a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who is from Norway.

Trump’s father, Frederick Christ Trump, was born in the Bronx on Oct. 11, 1905.

Tuesday’s misstatement was not the first time that the president has incorrectly identified his father’s birthplace. In a 2018 interview with “Fox News Sunday,” Trump did the same.

“I was there many, many years ago,” the president said of the European Union, which was not founded until 1993. “Meaning, my parents were born in the European Union. I love these countries; Germany, Scotland, they are still in there, right?”

During a visit to Scotland last July, Trump told reporters, accurately, that his mother was from Scotland, but he repeated the misinformation about his father.

“Don’t forget both of my parents were born in EU sectors — my mother was Scotland, my father was Germany.”

Trump’s grandfather Friedrich was indeed born in the German town of Kallstadt on March 14, 1869. Friedrich emigrated to the United States in 1885, at the age of 16, but did so before fulfilling his military service. In 1905 the kingdom of Bavaria wrote Friedrich a letter ordering him never to return.

Seeking to distance himself from his German heritage, Trump’s father, Fred, a prominent builder in New York, went on to claim Swedish heritage, probably for business reasons. Trump himself pushed this false narrative in The Art of the Deal, saying his father had emigrated to America “from Sweden as a child.”

The loss of Istanbul, the country’s business capital and Mr. Erdogan’s political base, is a particularly sharp setback for a president (shown in a file photo) who has tightened his control of the government and news media, stifled dissent, and, critics contend, manipulated election results.

Results reported on Tuesday by the semiofficial Anadolu news agency showed the opposition candidate for mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, at 48.79 percent, against 48.51 percent for Binali Yildrim, the candidate of Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, with 100 percent of ballots counted.

The results also confirmed the victory of the opposition Republican People’s Party, or C.H.P., in Ankara, the capital. The opposition candidate Mansur Yavas won 50.91 percent of the vote, over the AKP candidate Mehmet Ozhaseki’s 47.1 percent, with 100 percent of ballots counted.

More On Barr, Mueller

Alliance for Justice, Opinion: Barr Puts the Politics in DOJ, Bill Yeomans, right, April 2, 2019. Congress confirmed William Barr as attorney general despite his disqualifying record of enabling presidential misconduct. Nobody should be surprised that his short tenure has already revealed his willingness to elevate the political interests of the president over the traditions of the Department of Justice and the role of Congress.

His memo spinning the conclusions of the Mueller report made him a cheerleader for Trump, while his capitulation to Trump’s demand that the Department of Justice no longer defend the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act debased the rule of law for Trump’s political gain. His behavior bodes ill for the future in which Trump, with support from Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), will clamor for revenge investigations of the Mueller investigators. It will be up to Barr to stand up to political demands for investigations that lack an evidentiary predicate.

Barr’s letter summarizing the principal conclusions of the Mueller report was an overtly political act. He should have said nothing and sent the report itself to Congress. Not only did he spin the contents of the report, but he stepped in to override Mueller’s decision not to make a prosecutorial determination regarding obstruction of justice. According to Barr, Mueller’s non-decision left it to the Attorney General to make the call. Barr – whose 19-page memo contended that the president could not commit obstruction while exercising power given to him by Article II of the Constitution – was eager to oblige.

The most likely reason for Mueller’s non-call was that he knew DOJ could not prosecute the president. He had, however, found substantial evidence of obstruction that prevented exoneration of the president. He, therefore, decided to pass the information to Congress, which is the only entity with power to hold the president accountable.

There was no reason for anybody at DOJ to answer the hypothetical question whether the president should be prosecuted. Barr, right, playing free safety for Team Trump, however, swooped in to intercept Mueller’s pass to Congress and ran it back for a score, which prompted Trump and his entire bench to empty into the end-zone for a round of celebratory taunting.

By answering the obstruction question, Barr gave Trump the talking point he craved -- no collusion and no obstruction – which is far better than no collusion and no decision on obstruction. Barr, by issuing his memo well before release of any part of the actual report, gave Trump and his supporters ample time to spread the message. Despite the head start, the public isn’t buying. Polling by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal shows that only 29 percent believe that Trump has been exonerated. That number will not increase once the public sees the report, which surely contains evidence harmful to Trump.

Global Research, Book Review: The CIA Takeover of America in the 1960s Is the Story of Our Times, Edward Curtin (author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization), April 2, 2019. The Killing of the Kennedys and Today’s New Cold War. A Quasi-Review of "A Lie Too Big To Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy" by Lisa Pease.

When Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, 1968, the American public fell into an hypnotic trance in which they have remained ever since. The overwhelming majority accepted what was presented by government authorities as an open and shut case that a young Palestinian American, Sirhan Sirhan, had murdered RFK because of his support for Israel, a false accusation whose ramifications echo down the years. That this was patently untrue and was contradicted by overwhelming evidence made no difference.

“‘We’re all puppets,’ the suspect [Sirhan Sirhan] replied, with more truth than he could have understood at that moment.”

– Lisa Pease, quoting from the LAPD questioning of Sirhan'

Sirhan did not kill Robert Kennedy, yet he remains in jail to this very day. Robert Kennedy, Jr., who was 14 years old at the time of his father’s death, has visited Sirhan in prison, claims he is innocent, and believes there was another gunman. Paul Schrade, an aide to the senator and the first person shot that night, also says Sirhan didn’t do it. Both have plenty of evidence. And they are not alone.

There is a vast body of documented evidence to prove this, an indisputably logical case marshalled by serious writers and researchers. Lisa Pease is the latest. It is a reason why a group of 60 prominent Americans has recently called for a reopening of, not just this case, but those of JFK, MLK, and Malcom X. The blood of these men cries out for the revelation of the truth that the United States national security state and its media accomplices have fought so mightily to keep hidden for so many years.

That they have worked so hard at this reveals how dangerous the truth about these assassinations still is to this secret government that wages propaganda war against the American people and real wars around the world. It is a government of Democrats, Republicans, and their intelligence allies working together today to confuse the American people and provoke Russia in a most dangerous game that could lead to nuclear war, a possibility that so frightened JFK and RFK after the Cuban Missile Crisis that they devoted themselves to ending the Cold War, reconciling with the Soviet Union, abolishing nuclear weapons, reining in of the power of the CIA, and withdrawing from Vietnam. That is why they were killed.

The web of deceit surrounding the now officially debunked Democratic led Russia-gate propaganda operation that has strengthened Trump to double-down on his anti-Russia operations (a Democratic goal) is an example of the perfidious and sophisticated mutuality of this game of mass mind-control.

The killing of the Kennedys and today’s new Cold War and war against terror are two ends of a linked intelligence operation.

Moreover, more than any other assassination of the 1960s, it is the killing of Bobby Kennedy that has remained shrouded in the most ignorance.

It is one of the greatest propaganda success stories of American history.

In her exhaustive new examination of the case, A Lie Too Big To Fail, Lisa Pease puts it succinctly at the conclusion of her unravelling of the official lies that have mesmerized the public:

The assassination of the top four leaders of the political left in the five year period – President John Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968 – represented nothing less than a slow-motion coup on the political scene.

If anyone wishes to understand what has happened to the United States since this coup, and thus to its countless victims at home and throughout the world, one must understand these assassinations and how the alleged assassins were manipulated by the coup organizers and how the public was hoodwinked in a mind-control operation on a vast scale. It is not ancient history, for the forces that killed these leaders rule the U.S. today, and their ruthlessness has subsequently informed the actions of almost all political leaders in the years since. A bullet to the head when you seriously talk about peace and justice is a not so gentle reminder to toe the line or else.

April 1

Mueller Report

Politico, Press group asks judge to lift grand jury secrecy in Mueller report, Josh Gerstein, April 1, 2019. A group advocating for journalists and First Amendment rights is asking a judge to clear away one of the key obstacles the Justice Department is citing as grounds for withholding portions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's final report: the presence of information gathered through the secret actions of a grand jury.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed a petition Monday with Chief Judge Beryl Howell, right, of the U.S. District Court in Washington, asking her to rule that officials need not withhold from the Congress — or the public — any grand jury material in Mueller's report on his probe into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The move comes as Attorney General William Barr has pledged to prepare a version of the report for public release by mid-April. However, that pledge came with several caveats, including that the department would have to excise grand jury-related testimony and evidence.

Barr even noted in one letter that it could be a criminal offense for officials to release information covered by grand jury secrecy.The new petition amounts to a pre-emptive step to take the grand-jury concern off the table by having Howell rule that the interests of public and Congress in seeing the information outweigh any other concerns.

"This Court should enable the release of the Special Counsel's Report to the public to the greatest extent possible," attorney Ted Boutrous and other lawyers wrote in the new filing. "Although the Special Counsel's investigation has only recently concluded, the resulting report — and the grand jury material the Attorney General has proposed to redact therein—is of unique public and historical significance... The grand jury material at issue cuts to the core of our democracy."

A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the petition. (Note: This reporter serves on an oversight board for the Reporters' Committee.)

The move by the journalists' group is just the latest attempt to try to force disclosure of a broader portion or the entirety of Mueller's report, notwithstanding Barr's indication of the need for redactions.

On the same day Mueller sent his report to Barr, a Washington-based watchdog group — the Electronic Privacy Information Center — filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit demanding access to the document.

U.S. Border Issues

Washington Post, White House doubles down on threat to close U.S.-Mexico border, David J. Lynch, Maria Sacchetti and Joel Achenbach, April 1, 2019 (print ed). Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, right, said it would take “something dramatic” to persuade President Trump not to close the border. Such a move would have dramatic consequences for families seeking asylum and would seriously impede trade.

U.S. Economic Policy

Washington Post, Opinion: Why Moore is less, Robert J. Samuelson, April 1, 2019 (print ed). The real reason that Stephen Moore does not belong on the Federal Reserve Board is not that he is unqualified for the job, though he is. Nor is it that he has been a highly partisan and divisive figure for many years, though he has been.

The real reason is that, if confirmed by the Senate, Moore, right, could become the Fed chairman — and that is a scary possibility. It could spawn a global financial calamity.

Washington Post, Opinion: Most people think local journalism is financially healthy. Here’s the troubling reality, Margaret Sullivan (right), April 1, 2019 (print ed.). The business model for local news has crumbled, but the public seems blissfully unaware. In the 1990s, 30 percent profit margins were common at regional newspapers and the chains that owned them. Then came some brutal blows. The main source of revenue — print advertising — fell off a cliff as advertisers moved to the Internet or found other ways of reaching their customers. Department stores, once a mainstay of advertising, withered away in the digital economy.

And a new generation of news consumers never developed the daily-newspaper habit that their parents and grandparents had.

Newspapers (and to a lesser extent local TV stations) were forced to cut costs. Often, they did so in a way that made them less valuable to their remaining customers: By eliminating journalists from their newsrooms.

Newspapers cut 45 percent of their newsroom employees between 2008 and 2017.

And some of them — including those owned by hedge funds — are down far more than that. (In Denver, for example, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News boasted 600 journalists not much more than a decade ago; the latter paper has folded and the Post is down to well below 100 in its newsroom.)

But even in their shrunken state, many regional newspapers are producing important public-interest journalism. While this may seem encouraging, the ability to do so is fragile: the gutting of many local papers continues apace.

On Thursday, I will moderate a panel discussion featuring three journalists who exemplify this. (It’s one part of a morning-long event, devoted to saving local journalism, that will be live-streamed on The Washington Post’s website.)

Media News / Political Threat

Pastor Hope Carpenter, co-founder of a church in South Carolina, with her successors, Pastors Aventer (left) and John Gray on March 31, 2019.

“I love you Pastor John and Pastor Aventer. I believe in you, I’m praying for you, I’m rooting for you. I cut people. I’ve got a knife right in that pocket book,” Carpenter declared after riling up the Relentless congregation with a message she said she got from God to “hold fast.”

Speaking at the 8:30 a.m. service where she was introduced by Aventer Gray as “one of the greatest women of God that has ever graced the earth,” Carpenter (shown at right in a photo via Facebook) expressed her support for the couple, who succeeded Ron and Hope Carpenter.

The support comes in the wake of a slew of controversies concerning allegations of marital infidelity, the Relentless Church's purchase of a $1.8 million home for the Grays, and John Gray gifting his wife a $200K Lamborghini. The Christian Post, the Greenville News and other media have reported on different aspects of the controversies but on Sunday, Carpenter took aim at the local news source.

“Greenville News, come on. We done went through this. Alright. I’m still here and guess who else still gon’ be here?” she said, pointing to the Grays.

“See, if I did not know what God had brought me through back here and what God brought me through 10 years ago and what God brought me through five years ago, I would not have a deep intertwined root system that would help me to be able to hold on,” Carpenter told the congregation.Pastor Hope Carpenter (foreground) defends Pastors John and Aventer Gray at Relentless Church in Greenville, S.C., on March 31, 2019. | Screenshot: YouTube

In the nearly 30 years that Carpenter did ministry in Greenville with her husband, the couple faced controversies. It was in 2013 that Ron Carpenter revealed to their congregation that Hope had committed adultery multiple times over the previous 10 years and was under psychiatric observation.

"For the last 10 years, I have been masking a situation that has absolutely almost destroyed me. In 2004, the date we dedicated this facility, Easter Sunday 2004, I left here to find a very different woman than I had ever met," he told his church about the woman he courted in a “sex-free” relationship for three and a half years before they got married.

Describing his wife’s behavior at the time as "erratic, reckless, nonsensical, [and] destructive," he told his flock that he "sat through two years of grueling therapy with her to no avail."

The Carpenters moved to San Jose, California, last year and were officially installed as the new pastors of the 14,000-member Jubilee Christian Center, now rebranded as Redemption. They passed on the reins of their South Carolina church, which they founded in 1991, to the Grays.

Hope Carpenter insisted in her message on Sunday at Relentless Church that she survived by “holding fast” to her confession of faith and encouraged the church to do the same.

Roll Call, Trump’s district court picks are languishing. That could change, Todd Ruger, April 1, 2019. Senate rules change would shift focus to lower court nominees. As much as Senate Republicans pushed to confirm President Donald Trump’s appeals court nominees, the picks for the district courts have taken a backseat when it comes to getting a final confirmation vote on the floor.

That could all change with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s move to reduce the floor time needed for those lower court confirmation votes, a rules change the Senate could vote on as early as this week.

And there are plenty of district court nominees lined up and ready for votes for lifetime positions — some that have languished for more than a year.

Matthew Kacsmaryk, a nominee to be a judge for the Northern District of Texas, was first ready for a floor vote in December 2017. Howard Nielson, a nominee for the District of Utah, and Daniel Domenico, a pick for the District of Colorado, were ready for a floor vote in January 2018.

The rules change could allow McConnell to push the trio through in one day, two hours at a time. Under current rules — if Democrats objected to holding a floor vote on them and required 30 hours of debate — that might have eaten up an entire legislative week.

McConnell’s strategy to focus on appeals court picks was clear in the first two years of Trump’s presidency and has been a point of pride for the Kentucky Republican (shown at above right). He took only 26 days on average to get a final confirmation vote on the floor once the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced those nominees, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The dozen Trump appointments to the influential appeals courts — which have the final say in all but the roughly 70 cases that the Supreme Court decides each year — set a record for a president’s first year in office, and Republicans have now confirmed 37 of those circuit court judges. There are only two awaiting a Senate floor vote.

But it’s been a different story for district court nominees. It took an average of 133 days from committee vote to final confirmation vote for those lower court picks, CRS found. And there are 37 district court nominees still awaiting a floor vote.

Opioid Crisis

New York Times, Lawsuits Lay Bare Sackler Family’s Role in Opioid Crisis, Danny Hakim, Roni Caryn Rabin and William K. Rashbaum, April 1, 2019. The billionaire family, which controlled Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, knew of opioid abuse risks, according to lawsuits. But as America’s addiction crisis worsened, they saw a new market: selling treatments for the very problem their company helped create.

The Sacklers had a new plan.

It was 2014, and the company the family had controlled for two generations, Purdue Pharma, had been hit with years of investigations and lawsuits over its marketing of the highly addictive opioid painkiller OxyContin, at one point pleading guilty to a federal felony and paying more than $600 million in criminal and civil penalties.

But as the country’s addiction crisis worsened, the Sacklers spied another business opportunity. They could increase their profits by selling treatments for the very problem their company had helped to create: addiction to opioids.

Kathy Gonzalez knows that many people across the cornfields and cattle ranches of eastern Nebraska believe she is a murderer. It doesn’t change the fact that they owe her millions of dollars.

Ms. Gonzalez was one of six innocent people who collectively spent 77 years in prison in the murder of a 68-year-old woman named Helen Wilson, whose death haunted this rural county for decades. Now, years after DNA evidence exonerated the defendants, they are about to collect a $28 million civil rights judgment against Gage County, which prosecuted them based on false confessions.

Republican Jim Price of Wichita (shown in a mugshot) was arrested last month and charged in Sedgwick County. Prosecutors say that on May 17 he had 129.55 grams of dabs, a highly-concentrated hash oil, with intent to distribute, which is a felony in Kansas. He also faces misdemeanor charges of possession of steroids and marijuana, court records show.

He was initially arrested in May on suspicion of illegally possessing a gun and marijuana, but was not charged in court for that case until last week, court records show. The Wichita Eagle first reported that incident in September, when Price was running for a seat in the Kansas House. At that time, Price denied the arrest and charges had not been filed in the case.

Prosecutors filed charges against Price on March 25. That day, he bonded out of jail. The state is not pursuing gun-related charges, according to court filings.

His charging documents allege he had between 100 and 1,000 doses of THC dabs. THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, is the the psychoactive compound in marijuana that makes a user feel “high.” A dab is a highly-concentrated THC-based substance that is typically made by extracting THC from marijuana plants with a solvent like alcohol or butane.

Price said in an email that he was recovering from surgery and would answer questions through email.

Between the time a warrant was issued and his arrest, Price launched his own AM talk radio show, “The Jim Price Show,” which airs Saturday nights from 7 to 8 p.m.

On March 12, Price appeared on the conservative talk show “The Voice of Reason” with host Andy Hooser, the treasurer of the Sedgwick County Republican Party. Hooser announced Price’s show as the latest local program on KQAM, a Steckline Communications station.

“It’s good stuff,” Price told Hooser. “I’m looking forward to going in and diving deep, just like you have, and make sure that we talk about the issues as they are real, not where we get this fluffed up stuff at the media level.”

Asked if he thought Price would be allowed to keep his show given the pending criminal court case, Hooser said, “the station itself really doesn’t have anything to do much with the show.”

Hooser said Price actually pays the station to have his show on the air. “It’s kind of like an infomercial of sorts, where he pays for the time on the air to broadcast the show, and there’s a disclaimer on the show as well that you know it’s not in any affiliation with KQAM or Steckline Communications,” Hooser said.

Global Affairs: Venezuela

New York Times, Analysis: Trump, Putin and a Possible ‘Red-Line Moment’ in Venezuela, David E. Sanger, April 1, 2019. During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump often complained about how President Obama drew red lines that he never enforced. President Trump is now facing his own red-line moment, our correspondent writes in an analysis.

For the past week, the Trump administration has escalated its warnings about Russian intervention in the country, claiming that Moscow is helping to prop up President Nicolás Maduro (above right) of Venezuela and undermining the hopes of American officials that the Venezuelan military will oust him.

The United States recognizes Juan Guaidó (above left), the opposition leader, as Venezuela’s rightful president.

Washington Post, Joe Biden’s affectionate, physical style with women comes under scrutiny, Elise Viebeck, Colby Itkowitz, Michael Scherer and Matt Viser, April 1, 2019 (print ed). The appropriateness of the former vice president’s physical behavior is being questioned after a Democratic politician wrote a viral Internet post describing an alleged 2014 encounter that left her offended and uncomfortable.

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Broadcast and lecture audiences can count on the Project's director to deliver blunt, entertaining and cutting-edge commentary about public affairs, with practical tips for the millions of Americans caught up in unfair litigation or regulation.

Based in Washington, DC, Andrew Kreig is an accomplished fighter for the public interest. Learn from his decades of reporting, analysis and advocacy:

• Shocking tales of recent corruption, deception and cover-up by both parties in communities ranging from small towns to world capitals; and• Practical how-to tips for reformers on action that brings real-world results.

Midnight Writer News Podcast,'Presidential Puppetry' with Andrew Kreig, Host S.T. Patrick, Dec. 19, 2018 (Episode 105). Andrew Kreig, the director of the Justice Integrity Project and the author of Presidential Puppetry, joins S.T. Patrick to discuss presidential politics of the last 40 years. What should we have known about George H.W. Bush, Bill & Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, John Kerry, John Edwards, and John McCain?

Kreig takes a non-partisan approach to dissecting the pros, cons, misdeeds, and motivations of American presidential and vice-presidential candidates, dating back decades. In the interview, Kreig covers the Bush dynasty, why Reagan chose Bush in 1980, Bush and the October Surprise, the Willie Horton ad, The Election of 1992, Ross Perot’s deficiencies, what Fletcher Prouty still teaches us, the legitimacy of Bob Dole’s 1996 nomination, the value of Jack Kemp, Bush v Gore, The Two Johns: Kerry & Edwards, the real John McCain, and much more.

Kreig also discusses current events with us, including the Corsi/Stone vs Mueller situation and the unbelievable resolution of the Jeffery Epstein trial in Palm Beach. Andrew Kreig can be read and followed at the Justice Integrity Project.

Wiki Politiki, The Latest REAL News on the 9/11 Attacks and Finding Truth in a Sea of Lies, Steve Bhaerman, Dec. 18, 2018. An Interview with Andrew Kreig, Author, Attorney, Broadcaster and Founder of the Justice Integrity Project. Did you know that In a letter dated November 7, 2018, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York notified the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry that he would comply with the provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 3332 requiring him to present to a special grand jury the Lawyers’ Committee’s reports filed earlier this year of unprosecuted federal crimes at the World Trade Center?

You didn’t? That’s because mainstream media makes it its business to insure that anything that points to the nefarious doings of the real deep state is “none of its business.” The misinformation, disinformation and missing information that pollute corporate news have created the perfect field for “real” fake news to flourish.